P: We beat our profit forecast for the quarter, so we’ve got to be pleased.
C: I agreed, although there are some areas of concern.
P: Yes, but we always thought it would be a tough quarter. $2 million profit on $59 million of revenue is a good performance.
C: That’s true. We’re all delighted that profits went up. But revenues fell for the second quarter in a row-that is what worries me.
P: But we always predicted that, which was why we reduced costs by as much as we did.
C: Yes, I see that operating costs fell from $53 million in Q3 to $46 in Q4.
P: We made the mist of saving by switching to cheaper suppliers.
C: So what accounted for the rest of the costs?
P: One-off charges, either relating to redundancy payments or strategic acquisitions.
C: And what about the profit breakdown by geographic region?
P: Asia made $1.5 million profit: the Americas mad $ 1 million in profit; and we lost $500,000 in Europe.
C: Europe is still dragging us back then.
P: Yes, but we still improved on a loss of $ 700,000 in Q3.
C: And what about our European revenues?
P: They remained flat.
C: Well if we can keep costs low we might manage to break even in Europe in the next quarter.
P: Probably. We expect to see profitability in Europe in the next three to six months.
C: Is there any more scope for cost-cutting next years?
P: We expect to make some saving on shipping cost, but nothing major.
C: That’s fair enough, it’s not as if we need to do anything drastic.
CP: So how have you broken the information down?
PM: Each individual product is listed twice-once in its product category and once alphabetically.
CP: I see. And how does the colour coding work?
PM: Red means that we have a stock overhang for that product.
CP: And blue presumably means that that product has sold well.
PM: Actually, blue means that we sold out of it at some profit.
CP: Right. And if it’s just in black?
PM: So how many product lines have suffered fro an overhang?
PM:94, which makes up about 8% of our product range.
CP: that’s clearly too high; really we should be looking to have that figure.
PM: The question is whether we discontinue all of the poor seller or just try to remarket them.
CP: Well since we still have a lot of stock sitting in the warehouse we should try to remarketing them really.
PM: At the other end of the scale, we sold out of 114 product lines.
CP: Then we need to look at how quickly each one of those products sold out and up our repeat orders for them.
PM: OK. There’s also a section at the end of the report about how our promotional offers went.
CP: Yes, how did they go?
PM: Well of the five major promotions we’ve done so far, four went really well according to the sales figures.
CP: But the fifth one didn’t sell even with the promotional offer?
PM: No, I think we’d better cut our losses with that one and discontinue it.
