Liberty London sales plunge to £55.77m

Historic London department store Liberty London has reported full year sales dropped to £55.77 million compared to £93.14 million the year prior.

For the financial year, ending 30 January 2021, Liberty confirmed EBITDA was a loss of £12.59 million compared to a profit of £14.44 million in 2019.

The department store was forced to close for almost six months of the financial year, with restrictions on international travel, a drop in local visitors and store limits impacting footfall.

The store was still closed at the balance sheet date and subsequently re-opened on 12 April 2021.

Whilst the luxury department store narrowed its pre-tax loss, totalling £1.32 million (compared to £6.69 million in 2019), it also recorded a net profit of £2.52 million, improving on it's previous financial loss of £8.34 million.

Liberty benefitted from greatly online sales during the lockdown, showing strong revenue growth compared to the period prior. The strong growth was enabled by historical investments in the company's online infrastructure which allowed it to seamlessly transfer the Liberty product offering onto digital platforms.

The company also announced it had seen strong growth online in all categories, with "significant" growth across beauty and home. Other categories such as fabrics and homeware were also areas of growth.

Liberty also confirmed it utilised the Government's Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme from March 2020 and claimed a total of £2,499,000 in the financial year from HMRC. Despite a rough year, Liberty hired an extra 19 staff members overall.