New major shareholder for Designer Textiles

Speaking at the its AGM the company's chairman, Kerry Harding, told shareholders that around 20% of the company's shares changed hands last week at a premium to recent prices.

"A new major holder, who we believe is a Christchurch based family trust, purchased the majority of the shares. It is pleasing to see investors recognising the underlying discount in what was the then market price."

Designer Textiles says it has begun the new trading year on budget, but warned that New Zealand business conditions are not showing any sign of recovery.

"The currency crisis is increasing raw material costs and there is a lag period before we can recover the increases in prices. As a consequence of the deterioration conditions the second half the final trading profit for the year was well below earlier expectations."

Mr Harding says trading conditions in Australia however have improved since July.

"Australia, which had been slow all year, was significantly impacted by price pressure and uncertainty in the lead up to the introduction of GST. Clothing prices were subject to the full 10% increase and retailers were unsure of the effect on consumer demand. Since July, conditions have normalised significantly and results are improved"

Designer Textiles posted a loss of $121,000 for the year to June compared with last year's $1.617 million dollar profit. The result included two non-cash charges - $397,000 for goodwill on the acquisition of Mollers Textiles and a special depreciation write-down of $1.171 million.

Comments from our readers

No comments yet

Add your comment:

Your name:
Your email:	Not displayed to the public
Comment:
Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved.

Anti-spam verification:

Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process.