Troubled fashion retailer Esprit Holdings hopes to put an end to its losses as soon as next year, Chief Executive Jose Manuel Martinez told a German Sunday newspaper.
“I expect that we will soon – maybe even next year – no longer be loss making,” he said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
According to Reuters, Esprit swung to a net loss of HK$4.39bn ($566m) after revenue fell 14.1 per cent to HK$25.9bn in the fiscal year to end-June 2013.
For the current 2013/14 fiscal year, Esprit has forecast a further decline in turnover, partly due to store closures, but expects cost cuts will help reduce its operating expenses-to-sales ratio below 50 per cent from just over 65 per cent in the previous year.
“You cannot expect that after years of shrinking suddenly we would grow by 10 per cent, it doesn’t work like that.