JD Sports crowned king of the blue-chips

High Street chain shares up 3,200pc in the past decade

JD SPORTS has been crowned the best blue-chip stock of the past decade.

Shares in the chain, which calls itself the ‘King of Trainers’ and sells brands including Nike and Adidas, have risen 3,200pc from around 25p at the start of 2010 to 832.2p last night.

A saver who bought £1,000 of JD Sports shares ten years ago would now be sitting on £33,000. Someone who bought them at the turn of the century would now have an investment worth nearly £113,000.

The performance is even more eyecatching given the crisis that has engulfed the High Street in recent years.

While JD Sports shares have rocketed, other retailers have struggled amid fierce competition from online rivals. High Street stalwart Marks & Spencer was this year relegated from the FTSE100 for the first time since the index was set up in 1984. Its shares are down 43pc since 2010.

And JD Sports, which has 2,420 stores and more than 50,000 staff in 19 countries, has left arch-rival Sports Direct in its wake.

Shares in Sports Direct, which is led by Mike Ashley and which was recently renamed Frasers, have halved in value since peaking in 2014, although they are still nearly five times higher than at the start of the decade.

Russ Mould, investment director at broker AJ Bell, said: ‘JD Sports is a great example of how retailers can still rise above all of the challenges thrown at them by changes in fashion, wage regulations and workers’ rights, and technology, to name but three.’

City commentator David Buik, of Core Spreads, said: ‘To keep producing results of this magnitude is extraordinary. This group has gone from strength to strength, despite the ferocious competition from Sports Direct. JD Sports has focused on vogue brands, which have universal appeal.’

The success over the past decade is a victory for executive chairman Peter Cowgill, who has run it since 2004.

It is also a victory for the Rubin family, who own a 55pc stake in JD Sports worth nearly £4.5bn through Pentland Group.

Pentland, which started out selling shoes in Liverpool in 1932, also owns brands including Speedo, Berghaus, Ellesse, Canterbury of New Zealand and Mitre.

JD was not the only success in a decade that has seen the FTSE 100 index rise by about 40pc.

According to analysis by AJ Bell, the next biggest gains after JD Sports came from the equipment rental firm Ashtead, and the property website Rightmove, which delivered returns of 3,120pc and 1,260pc respectively.

Mould said: ‘Such firms have been like gold dust for the past decade. The big question is, will they remain so?’

He said that only one stock in the top ten – the LSE – started the decade as a FTSE 100 company.

‘In other words, if you are looking for the really big winners, you are probably better off by starting to look in the FTSE 250,’ he said.

‘This harks back to Jim Slater’s assertion that “elephants don’t gallop”. The established giants simply can’t grow fast enough to necessarily generate these sorts of returns.’

In the FTSE 250, marketing firm 4imprint delivered the highest returns, at 2,950pc. The secondbiggest was from retailer Games Workshop, at 2,620pc.