- Acquisition of Salter in UK and Petra in Germany to deliver market share gains
- Supermarket sales picked up slack from lower online sales
Management’s taste for acquisitions is paying off at kitchen and homeware specialist UP Global Sourcing (UPGS), which has restored to higher margins after the purchase of the Salter brand in 2021. No longer paying to license the scales maker helped to push UP’s gross margins to 24.4 per cent in the six months to 31 January, after falling last year to 22.8 per cent. UP also saw fit to boost the dividend by more than a third, and the shares rose 7 per cent on results day.
The boom in home cooking led to unusually high online sales during the pandemic, where margins fell because of spiralling shipping prices alongside lower availability. Shipping is not yet back to normal, with “only about 20 per cent of ships” arriving on time, said UP’s managing director Andrew Gossage, but he added that both availability and prices have already turned a corner and further improvements are expected in 2022.