“There is a lag between operational change and visible results,” said online fashion retailer Asos in its half-year report, giving an optimistic spin on half-year numbers that were conspicuously awful.
While the new chief executive talks the management blah of optimising and rightsizing, an adjusted pre-tax loss of £87.4m was several degrees worse than the City had expected. The unadjusted version, which included a £129m stock write-down and various other whacks, was a loss of £291m, which is going some in the space of six months.
