Overall, not shooting it out of the park but showing no signs of falling over either.

Highlights include:

• Slight increase in revenue over pcp, but 12% jump on previous half.
• Management indicating sales momentum similar to 1H FY24 and, if that continues, will result in a significant beat of FY23.
• Margins expanding again. Beacon's margins are even better than those of Nick Scali, which is kind of amazing given the - justified - love for that company.
• Everything is costing more. Deliberate investment in marketing, particularly Trade, but Selling & Distribution, Admin, Finance costs and D&A all rising.
• After a couple of years of stagnant store growth, the number of stores is on the rise, increasing by 4 in the half with another 4 expected to open in 2H.
• Continuing to get traction on the Trade strategy with in-store Trade sales up 25.9% and online Trade sales up 51%. This would both suggest the investment in the strategy is working, but also that non-Trade sales are soft.

They remain a retailer that goes under the radar but haven't done much wrong on the journey. With a store pipeline over 190 stores in Australia alone, there appears to significant opportunity for growth ahead.

They also run a DRP with a 5% discount, which is one of the better free lunches getting around.

[Held]

***

I'll give this a proper write up when things get a bit quieter but this is a recent addition to the Noddy stable and a company I'm pretty excited about. At face value there are plenty of reasons not to like it - with a market cap of approximately $650m it's bigger than I usually look at, it's a retailer, there's clear nepotism at play with a father/son Chairman/CEO relationship, it's share price has already almost doubled this year and it's exposed to COVID. But looking past that, this is actually a really high quality company. It's core Australian retail offering continues to grow steadily but relentlessly (summary of income statement history shown below) but it now has two further growth drivers - in Trade and overseas expansion - that are both showing promise of becoming as large as the existing retail business by themselves. Anyway, I'll post a valuation in the next few weeks hopefully.

[Held]