Angling Direct – this week’s Interim statement could help to push shares, now 50p, a lot higher yet, despite the over 40% rise since end-August

Mark Watson-Mitchell – 04.10.2025

This coming Tuesday, 7^th October, will see Angling Direct (LON:ANG) report its Interim Results for the six months to end-July – they should be good enough to see the recent strength in the fishing tackle group’s share price being continued.

The Business

Angling Direct's purpose is to inspire everyone to get out and enjoy an exceptional fishing experience, regardless of background or ability, in the great outdoors.

The Norfolk-based group is the leading omni-channel specialist fishing tackle retailer in the UK, with an established and growing presence in Europe.

It sells fishing tackle products and related equipment through its network of in excess of 50 UK retail stores, as well as through its leading digital platform (www.anglingdirect.co.uk) and the MyAD Fishing Club app.

The company has three further native language websites in its key European territories (www.anglingdirect.de, .fr, .nl), with orders fulfilled by its international distribution centre in The Netherlands.

Angling Direct currently sells over 25,000 fishing tackle products from industry-leading brands alongside its own brands 'Advanta', and entry-level offering 'Discover'.

On Wednesday 20^th August, the group issued a Trading Update reporting a strong first-half, in fact it was exceeding expectations.

Total revenues increased by 17.0% to £53.6m (£45.8m), with UK revenues showing a significant rise, with UK retail store sales up 15.4% to £30.5m and UK online sales increasing by 21.2% to £20.6m.

The group stated that its total UK sales reached £51.1m, a 17.7% increase, while its European sales showed a smaller increase of 5.1% to £2.5m.

Reflecting investments in store expansion and new technology, the group’s net cash and cash equivalents decreased to £12.5m from £17.0m.

The company opened two new stores, bringing the total to 55.

Total UK like-for-like sales grew 14.2%, reflecting the strength of the omni-channel proposition and increasing customer reach, evidenced through the continued growth of the MyAD customer loyalty club to over 496k subscribers (January 2025: 409k) at 31^st July and reaching 500k in August.

Through the Share Buy-back programme it returned £1.7m to its shareholders in the period.

Encouragingly the company stated that it looks to meet full-year market consensus expectations of £97.7m in revenue and £3.75m in adjusted EBITDA.

Management Comment

CEO Steve Crowe stated that:

"I am pleased to report that we have delivered another period of sustained progress against our medium-term objectives.

Our increasing customer appeal underpinned by our loyalty fishing club, MyAD, and the associated growth of revenues in our existing UK stores and digital platforms, provides us with further confidence in achieving our medium-term UK revenue target of £100m.

In the UK, we have continued to build on the strong momentum delivered in FY 25 by leveraging both our digital and physical footprint to increasingly join up our omni-channel customer offer.

We have made pleasing progress on gross margin development against the inflationary cost base backdrop.

Our focus remains on delivering the best value, flexibility and service for our customers and we are pleased to have opened two new stores to date, and the new openings pipeline remains strong.

In Europe, we are pleased that our Utrecht store continues to scale customers and revenues as it trades through its first full angling season.

We remain focused on delivering on our medium-term and during H1 26 we executed further strategic and operational changes to deliver upon these.

The Board also remains confident that the Group is comfortably trading in line with full year consensus market expectations."

Broker’s View

Analyst Matthew McEachran, at Singer Capital Markets, rates the shares as a Buy.

His estimates for the current year to end-January 2026 are for revenues of £98.8m (£89.0m) with adjusted pre-tax profits of £2.1m (£1.8m), lifting earnings up to 2.0p (1.8p per share.

After this week’s results announcement, I would look for an updating of this analyst’s estimates for 2026 and then also 2027.

My View

Despite tricky trading conditions this £37m-capitalised is doing quite well.

The group could have some £13.5m cash in the bank by the end of the current year.

Its shares, which are not cheap, have moved up 40% since the August Trading Update, are now 50p.

If they fall back on any profit-taking, then perhaps risk-tolerant investors should take advantage of any price-easing.

They were up to 55p last Wednesday, so a good positive statement could help to push them back up there again, and then even higher.