Busted Narratives: Fast Fashion Falters (Short H&M)

We’re old enough to remember when fast fashion was allegedly decimating retail and every apparel retailer under the sun was rejiggering its supply chain to fight fire with fire. Well, yesterday, fast fashion retailer Hennes & Mauritz HB — better known in the U.S. as H&M —reported earnings and to say that they were dogsh*t would be an understatement. Here is the stock as of yesterday:

Man that chart is ugly: that’s a 50% drop in the last year. This takes the company all the way down to 2005 levels. What is going on?

For starters, operating profit fell 62% in the three months through February from 3.2 billion SEK to 1.3 billion SEK. And more problematic: the company has $4.3 billion of unsold inventory. This is the stock-in-trade picture as of yesterday:

Y’zikes. Analysts are freaking out.

In the words of Karl-John Persson, the company’s CEO:

“While the assortment is appreciated by our customers, we have not improved fast enough. In addition to this, we made some mistakes in the assortment mix in the second half of 2017 that affected the top line. And now, we're working hard to ensure improvements, including fashion improvements and to improve value for money further as well as, of course, and also to have the right balance and assortment mix with the right products in the right -- at the right time, in the right amount to the right channels.”

Clearly. So, after dropping this steaming pile of bad news, Persson does what all good retail CEOs do these days: drop buzzwords and hot catch phrases like they’re hot. In trying to assuage analyst concerns after this buzzsaw of an earnings report, Persson goes all in with '“new store concepts", “optimize the store portfolio,” “image recognition,” “personalized product feeds,” “automated warehouses,” “advanced analytics and artificial intelligence,” “cloud, APIs and microservices,” and “RFID and 3D.” Did you catch all of that? Don’t know about you, but we’re impressed. These guys really threw the whole kitchen sink at us with this pixie cloud of meaninglessness. Take note: if you’re a restructuring advisor or performance improvement specialist seeking a company-side retail mandate, you have our permission to cut and paste this paragraph into your deck. Perhaps you can win over an executive team too-embarrassed to ask you what the hell any of it actually means as a practical matter.