Burberry upgrades forecasts over strong American and Asian sales

LUXURY fashion brand Burberry said sales were set to be higher than first thought as rich shoppers in Asia and the US increased spending on its products.

The company said sales in the three months to March 27 were now expected to jump between 28 per cent and 32 per cent compared with a year earlier. Bosses have benefited from stores being open again in China, South Korea and the US.

Burberry has also been focusing on selling more products at full price, rather than with discounts, and more sales are now seeing customers spend the ticket price.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, suggested wealthy customers who would travel to Europe to spend big in Burberry seem to be shopping in local Burberry stores.

He said: “A lot of its business has historically come from Asian tourists taking trips across Europe.

They like to spend big and its products are highly desirable.

“The restrictions on international travel are only in the nascent stages of being lifted and the return of tourist-related sales may not pick up in earnest until 2022.

“Therefore, current sales are likely to be driven by domestic customers. In January it flagged good full-price sales in places like the Americas, mainland China and Korea.”

MR Clemens is ignoring basic scientific evidence in his letter of March 8, 2021.

Firstly, in 2007 the recommendations of the Independent Scientific Group based on the Randomised Badger Cull

Trial (RBCT) conclusively showed that culling badgers should have no ‘meaningful’ part to play in future bovine TB policy. This was a peer-reviewed, double-locked scientific study that is held in high regard by the international scientific community.

Secondly, the main driver of bTB itself is irrefutably cattlecattle transmission. As shown by the excellent visual created in 2016 by the Centre for Veterinary Epidemiology and Risk Analysis (CVERA), University College

Dublin, cattle movements in this country, like Ireland, have increased exponentially over the last few decades.

Scientific evidence shows that the TB test for cattle has been (and is) woefully inadequate. To use the eloquent words of Mr Clemens, cattle drool and piddle all over the field as they graze so one cow with a false negative test can have a big impact on the rest of the herd outside, let alone inside.

Remember, the present Cumbria TB breakdown has conclusively shown it originated from cattle imported from Northern Ireland.

And so, cattle-cattle transmission should be addressed far more forcefully than has been the case.

Secondly, looking at the country as a whole not every farm by any means treats cattle bedding or slurry as it should and it is common practice that cattle bedding and slurry from TB-farms is transported to other farms to spread on non-TB farms.

Moving onto hedgehogs, as stated by the University of Brighton, other scientific institutions and charities dedicated to saving hedgehogs, the main reasons for the precipitous fall in hedgehog numbers are land use change in urban and rural areas, increased use of pesticides and infrastructure developments such as roads. A basic grasp of badger ecology shows that badgers rarely live long enough (a) to become infectious and (b) to die from bTB.

His views on the best way of creating a ‘healthy’ badger population are pure fantasy and, finally, I cannot find a survey that reveals 95% of vets support the cull.

In fact, a few years ago Farming UK reported that ‘vet support for badger cull falls’ whilst it should be well known that the British Veterinary Association withdrew support for free-shooting badgers some years ago. A fact that the NFU, the Government and cull companies still ignore.

Amanda Bristol