Moonpig lowers sales forecast ahead of uncertain Christmas

Greeting card retailer Moonpig has lowered its sales forecast for 2023 to £320m down from £350m in the half year to 31 October 2022.

The company cited challenging trading conditions in October and November, including Royal Mail strikes, as the reason for changing its forecast.

It has seen mild growth when compared to H1 FY21 with gross revenue up 0.1% to £143m and gross profit up nearly 11% to £77m. However adjusted EBITDA fell 1.2% to £34.6m.

Moonpig’s three-year comparative has seen gross revenues increase 115% and gross profits 119% compared with H1 FY20.

Nickyl Raithatha, CEO, said: “As the clear online leader in greetings cards, Moonpig Group is positioned to benefit as the market continues the long-term structural shift to online. Our resilient business model offers a powerful and unique combination of leading market positions, strong customer retention, high profitability and robust cash generation, giving us flexibility to manage through the economic cycle.

“As a result, our expectations for profit for the current financial year remain unchanged. We remain focused on delivering against our strategy, with the successful migration of Greetz onto our central technology platform and innovations such as the launch of video greeting cards and ongoing testing of our Moonpig Plus subscription service.”

She added: “Despite the difficult trading environment, we have delivered a robust set of results and with our data-led model we are ideally positioned to capture the significant long term opportunities in our markets.”