Sales and profits up at half-year

Moonpig trials new corporate offering, acts on Royal Mail delays

Customers are embracing card creativity features

Sales at Moonpig Group were up 6.5% at the half-year, and testing of a new offering for SME business customers is underway as part of the PLC’s growth plans – but its net promotor score has been hit because of Royal Mail delivery issues.

Group sales in the six months to 31 October rose to £152.1m, while gross profit jumped by 15.3% to £89m.

Adjusted EBITDA margin increased from 24.2% to 27.2%, while adjusted pre-tax profit was up 9.7% to £20.8m.

Sales at Moonpig were up by nearly 5%, but revenues at Dutch wing Greetz fell by 9.8% due to the economic downturn.

Turnover at Experiences rose by 4.5%.

Moonpig has launched an invitation-only beta version of a new corporate offering, Moonpig at Work.

This is initially targeted at SME gifting to employees around events such as birthdays, work anniversaries and Christmas. “As we continue to test and iterate this product based on customer feedback, we will expand the service to our waitlist in the coming months,” the group stated.

Moonpig Group is also using its tech know-how to try and offset issues caused by Royal Mail not meeting its performance targets for First Class mail deliveries.

Moonpig said: “A key area of focus is customer net promoter score, which continues to be impacted by Royal Mail not meeting its regulatory performance targets for the delivery of First Class mail.

“We are taking steps to mitigate this, including the introduction of earlier communication with customers who have set occasion reminders to encourage advance ordering. We also plan to leverage postcode-level data to provide dynamic guidance to UK customers on the predicted delivery date for their order.”

Royal Mail was fined £5.6m by Ofcom last month for its failings.

The group said it continued to use AI to finesse its offerings, including a “significant upgrade” to its capabilities “which now incorporate customer-level data alongside data from card personalisation into our gift recommendation algorithms”.

Tailored online journeys for every user include personalised homepage banners and personalised promos.

CEO Nickyl Raithatha said he was pleased with the performance amid a challenging macro-economic environment.

“We continue to innovate to attract and retain our loyal customers. During the period nearly four million customers used our innovative card creativity features such as audio and video messages, AI-generated text suggestions, stickers, flexible photos and digital gifting solutions,” he said.

“As the clear online leader in greetings cards, we remain well positioned to benefit from the long-term structural market shift to online.”

In August, Georgie Smallwood joined the PLC’s executive committee as its first female chief product and technology officer. Moonpig has set a diversity target that new hires into technology security, engineering, product and analytics roles should be around 45% women.

Shares in the group rose in early trading but had returned to yesterday’s closing price of 176.30p at the time of writing (52-week high: 191.40p, low: 102.00p).