Plymouth-headquartered online building materials retailer CMO Group PLC has seen sales soar to £77m in the past year despite the building industry being hit with delays and shortages of products and continuing Covid disruptions..
The company, now the UK’s largest online-only retailer of building materials, revealed that total sales for 2021 were up 47% to £77m from 2020’s £52m.
In a trading update for the year ended December 31, 2021 the Burrington Way-headquartered business revealed H2 revenue of £38m, an increase of 33% over H2 in 2020. Like-for-Like sales grew 12% year-on-year, and by 30% over two years.
The strong sales growth has been driven by improved revenue from CMO’s online superstores and from continued growth in Total Tiles, acquired in December 2020, which saw 10% year-on-year growth.
JTM Plumbing has performed in line with expectations since acquisition in October 2021. Progress is being made towards the launch of plumbingsuperstore.co.uk which is expected in Q2 of 2022, the company said.
Prevalent during H2 were the widely reported industry headwinds encompassing delays and shortages of product, compounded by increased disruption from Covid in Q4.
A continued focus on demand planning and a 29% increase in warehousing capacity to support an increased stock holding mitigated the worst of this disruption, CMO explained, however it is estimated that during H2 the opportunity cost to the group of these issues amounted to about 5% of expected sales.
Despite this, the company said it continued to experience strong growth in H2, with total sales growth of 33% and one and two year like-for-like growth of 1% and 28%, demonstrating the resilience of its business model.
In the nine trading weeks prior to this statement, CMO has seen product availability improving with like-for-like revenues on dispatched products being 13% ahead of last year.
With strong sales growth, and despite the headwinds, the company is anticipating reporting full year adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, amortisation, exceptional and acquisition costs), a measure of profitability, in-line with market expectations.
CMO said that as it enters a new financial year, the markets in which it operates remain buoyant. With a strong order book and a disruptive position in its chosen markets, its board is confident CMO will deliver continued growth in the year to come.
Dean Murray, chief executive of CMO Group Plc, said: "We have had another good period of strong growth further enhancing our proposition and growing our customer base by over 30%.
“Our markets remain robust and we will continue to disrupt the traditional marketplace through continuing to be innovative and expanding the breadth of products for our customers.
“With our strong order book and positive signs of some abatement in the supply and distribution issues faced in 2021, we enter 2022 with confidence.”
CMO operates seven specialist websites: Roofingsuperstore.co.uk, Drainagesuperstore.co.uk, Insulationsuperstore.co.uk, Doorsuperstore.co.uk, Tileandfloorsuperstore.co.uk, cmotrade.co.uk and Totaltiles.co.uk. Its sites list more than 75,000 products.
It began as a small outfit based at Plymouth’s Airport Business Park, but after 43% compound growth over previous years it now has a large HQ at Burrington Way, where most of its 200-plus employees are based. The company said its market remains buoyant and the group is managing industry headwinds well with an expectation to deliver double-digit sales growth in-line with full-year expectations.
