“Excellent start”
Tiffany’s net profit rose 50 % in 2014’s first quarter to 125.6 million dollars (92 million euro), while analysts had expected a 100 million dollar profit (73 million euro).
The higher profit was the result of higher turnover (+ 13 % to 1.01 billion dollars or 780 million euro), which also trumped analysts’ expectations at 956.2 million dollars (700 million euro). Tiffany states that its turnover would have grown 15 % if exchange rates had remained stable and that the like-for-like turnover grew 11 %.
“This is an excellent and encouraging start to the year. We were pleased with the strong and broad-based sales growth across most regions and product categories”, CEO Michael Kowalski said.
Tiffany announced in March that it would raise the average price of its products and also launched several new products this year, like its Atlas collection, one of the group’s cheaper collections which has turned out to be the engine of the American turnover growth. Japanese turnover also grew strongly, up 20 % to 17 million dollars (12.4 million euro).
