Quiz has said it is in discussions with landlords on stores with leases coming up to expiry looking for an average of 30% rent reductions as it battles to turnaround the flagging fortunes of its estate. 

Chief commercial officer at the struggling retailer, Sheraz Ramzan, said Quiz have an average lease exposure of 26-months across its 73-strong UK store estate. He said this gave the brand a lot of flexibility to renegotiate rent reductions.

“We’re taking a view on each store, on a case-by-case basis. This financial year we’ve renegotiated eight leases on stores that came to expiry. We were quite prepared to walk away from those stores, but we managed to achieve an average of 30% rent reduction across those stores, which has allowed us to hang on to them.”

Ramzan said that the leases on a further eight stores would be up before the end of the financial year, and he said Quiz was in discussion to achieve those rent reductions, or better, across those sites too.

“We’re in negotiations with those eight and, again, if we don’t get the deals we want, then we’ll walk away,” he said.

Chief executive Tarak Ramzan said that landlords were “undoubtedly” more open to discussions around rent reductions in the current retail environment, and said “there’s a lot more flexibility” both in terms of the amounts of rent and the lengths of the terms.

The two were speaking after Quiz reported a dissapointing interim set of results in the six months to September 30, 2019. The fast-fashion brand posted a loss of ÂŁ6.8m, down from a profit of ÂŁ3.8m for the same period. Underlying profit before tax fell 85% to just ÂŁ0.6m, while revenues fell 5% to ÂŁ63.3m. 

uiz has said it is in discussions with landlords on stores with leases coming up to expiry looking for an average of 30% rent reductions as it battles to turnaround the flagging fortunes of its estate.

 

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