If only retail were all about shops. Then Sweden’s H&M would be a steal: its fat margins are getting fatter, it delivers an impressive 70 per cent return on capital employed and – best of all – its shares have not been this cheap for more than a year. But investors have to be armchair economists, and here the outlook is darker.
The world’s third-biggest fashion retailer is structurally short the dollar. It buys two-thirds of its stock in US dollars from the Far East and sells about the same proportion in euros. The relative strength of the euro over the past decade has helped push its gross margin to an industry-leading 60 per cent. But this year the euro has dropped 15 per cent against the dollar. If it falls to parity against the dollar, Morgan Stanley estimates it would knock 4 percentage points from H&M’s gross margin.
Protecting the margin would mean increasing prices (difficult in austerity-bound Europe) or making heroic savings. This year it has managed the latter: the gross margin actually rose in the first half to 65 per cent thanks to underworked suppliers cutting their prices. But H&M’s super-cheap eastern sourcing strategy looks vulnerable. Rising US demand, wage pressures, commodity prices and transport costs will all begin to squeeze.