Accent Group: Resilient End to a Tough Year

Narrow-moat Accent’s trading update reveals a beat on our second-half fiscal 2024 sales and profit expectations. Earlier in the year, the company announced like-for-like sales in the first seven weeks of the second half of fiscal 2024 were 1% below the previous corresponding period. Given the headwinds facing discretionary retail, including cost of living pressures and interest rate rises, we expected conditions would deteriorate further through the second half. But this proved too pessimistic. Accent’s second-half like-for-like sales improved by 4% on the PCP, a sharp turnaround from a soft start. Accordingly, we upgrade our fiscal 2024 group sales forecast by 4% to AUD 1.5 billion.