Mountain Warehouse chief executive Mark Neale has warned the business may need to make substantial redundancies following a “catastrophic” drop in sales triggered by the coronavirus.
The boss of the outdoor retail specialist, which reported its 22nd consecutive year of record Christmas sales just months ago, has said his business is now in a “battle for survival” after recording plummeting shopper numbers in recent days.
Neale said he expected low footfall to worsen following the government’s advice yesterday against large public gatherings and increasingly stringent measures on self-isolation and social distancing.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Neale said: “Our sales have completely evaporated since Thursday and Friday last week. Yesterday our sales were about 50% down on what we would expect and following the announcements yesterday, I expect they are going to be worse today and tomorrow.”
He described the situation, even for a business like his that has until now been one of the high street’s most resilient players and consistently recorded growing sales and profits in its yearly results, as “catastrophic”.
Neale called for the government to take “urgent” and “enormous” action to help businesses around the country as he forecast that a financial crisis would subsequently follow the public health scare triggered by the pandemic.
“I don’t mean a rates holiday or something like that,” said Neale “We have already taken those numbers out of our cash flow projections. We don’t need somebody covering some sick pay, we need a response along the lines of what Gordon Brown did in the banking crisis [in 2008] and it probably needs to be bigger than that.”
New chancellor Rishi Sunak is expected to announce a financial package for businesses later today, including advice for people facing unemployment following the introduction of social distancing measures.
Mountain Warehouse was founded by Neale in 1997 and now operates nearly 400 stores across nine countries.
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