JD Sports sinks by £327m after booming sales stall

HIGH Street fashion chain and retail success story JD Sports saw £327m wiped off its value after pinning a recent disruption to booming sales on the Muslim festival of Eid.

The sportswear firm yesterday said it had to move forward its clearance sale to accommodate this year’s festival, which marks the end of Ramadan, and sees many buy gifts for their family.

As a result, store sales comparatives will not be ‘truly meaningful’ until July 29, the end of the first half of its financial year. By the time results are reported in September, JD said distortions from last year’s Euro football tournament will also have unwound.

Disruptions aside, JD said the strong performance – which has seen shares soar this year – looks set to continue, with growth in line with market expectations.

Shares fell 8.5pc, or 33.6p, to 364.2p yesterday, but remain up 14.1pc for the year.

Purplebricks, the digital house-- seller once labelled the ‘ Uber of real estate agents’, advanced after reporting its maiden UK profit and soaring revenues.

But analysts are concerned that the upstart firm has yet to reveal how many properties it has sold.

Purplebricks is backed by star fund manager Neil Woodford and runs a network of self-employed estate agents, charging customers a fixed fee rather than a percentage of the final sale price.

The firm, which recently launched in Australia and will enter the US, booked a £200,000 profit in the UK for the year ended April 30 against revenues of £46.7m, up 151pc since 2016. it also halved total company losses to £6m, leading its chairman to claim the company was ‘ in a strong position to become the number one estate agent in the UK for both listings and assets’.

But some investors are less than convinced, with Markit reporting that more than 70pc of its stock available to borrow is out on loan, indicating short-selling.

The worry is that there are issues with the way its agents are incentivised and paid. Shares rose 5.6pc, or 22.5p, to 421.5p, and are up 197.9pc year-to-date.

The FTSE 100 fell 0.51pc, or 37.48 points to 7350.32. Financials did well after responding warmly to the news that the Federal Reserve has given US banks the go-ahead to buy back stock and pay dividends to shareholders.

HSBC reached a four-year high after being upgraded to ‘overweight’ by analysts at Morgan Stanley. its shares rose by 4.2pc, or 29.1p, to 715.5p, adding £5.8bn to HSBC’s value.

The biggest success story of the week so far has been biotechnology firm Oxford BioMedica, which rose 9.7pc, or 0.68p, to 7.66p and is now up 93.9pc since Monday.

investors have turned their focus on the firm since broker Rodman & Renshaw gave it a ‘buy’ rating on Monday and said it is being undervalued. Rodman said investors are not pricing in Oxford BioMedica’s role in the manufacturing of a ‘ potential blockbuster’ leukaemia therapy.

Elsewhere, Babcock shares were off 1.1pc, or 10p, to 885p after the engineer won a contract from the Norwegian government to provide emergency air ambulance support across the country.

Lorry firm Wincanton, which moves items for the likes of Sainsbury’s and ikea, fell 9.4pc, or 27.5p, to 265p after warning of weakness in some of its divisions. in the junior market, tech firm

Sopheon rose 0.7pc, or 2.5p, to 365p after announcing that it will provide product development software for an olive oil producer in the US.