MADRID (Reuters) -Inditex (BME: ITX), which owns Zara, reported an 80 percent increase in quarterly profit on Wednesday.This was due to a rise in sales as people stuck at home during the pandemic looked to buy new clothes.
In the quarter from February to April, the company’s net profit went up to 760 million euros, which is $812.06 million. Analysts thought this would happen because the company did better than it did before the pandemic.
The company was able to make up for higher costs by raising prices at the beginning of the year, which caused sales to go up by 36% to 6.7 billion euros in the first quarter.
Before the pandemic hit in the first quarter of 2019, Inditex made a profit of 734 million euros and had sales of 5.93 billion euros.
Inditex was able to make up some of the money it lost in Russia when it closed its 502 stores there in March because of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. This was possible because the economies of Britain, Europe, and the United States are still getting better.
If you take out the 216 million euros that Inditex lost because of stores closing in Russia, the company made a profit of 940 million euros in the reported quarter.
The company says that from February 1 to March 13, Russia made up 5% of its sales growth and was its second-largest market in terms of shops.
Inditex is best known for its fast-to-market Zara brand, which makes up 71% of the company’s sales. In the first three months of its fiscal year 2022, Inditex did better than its main competitor, H & M, which had net sales of $5.1 billion.
($1 = 0.9356 euros)
