Ramsdens Holdings – Pre-Close Trading Update due within days, shares at 375p – up 53% this year, brokers TP 385p (too low) now going a lot higher!

Mark Watson-Mitchell - 01.10.2025

Within days, I am expecting the £122m-capitalised Ramsdens Holdings (LON:RFX) to be announcing its Pre-Close Trading Update for its Trading Year to end-September.

And with the way that the price of gold has risen so dramatically, and so too with silver, it leads me to expect some excellent business indications for that year and for the year just starting.

The group’s shares have performed superbly this year, up over 53% since I featured the business on 14^th January, then trading at 245p – they are now 375p – showing an impressive 51% advance in just over nine months.

And I reckon that there is even more to come yet!

The Business

With its Head Office in Middlesbrough on Teeside, the group, which can be traced back to the 1970’s, today has over 800 employees operating from 169 stores within the UK (including one franchised store).

It also has a growing online presence.

The business is an expanding, diversified, financial services provider and retailer, operating in the four core business segments of foreign currency exchange,

pawnbroking loans, precious metals buying and selling and the retailing of second-hand and new jewellery.

The group, which does not offer unsecured high-cost short-term credit, is fully FCA authorised for its pawnbroking and credit broking activities and also as an authorised payment institution.

In the last year, it has been following a slower new store opening programme, however in this new year, it anticipates returning to its previous strategy of six to eight new stores each year.

Interim Trading Update

At the start of June this year the group reported its Interims to end-March.

Following a record first half and reflecting the much stronger gold price, the company stated that it expected that its full year would report record profits.

CEO Peter Kenyon stated that:

"We are proud of the progress Ramsdens has made in the first half of FY25.

We continue to benefit from our diversified business model that has enabled strong, profitable growth and attractive ROE for our shareholders.

While all of our income streams achieved growth during the first half, our purchase of precious metals segment delivered an outstanding performance, with the well-publicised and sustained exceptionally high gold price encouraging more customers to sell unwanted jewellery.

We are encouraged by the initial performance from our designated gold buying website which was launched during the Period with traffic significantly ahead of what we had expected.

As a result of the exceptional performance we are pleased to reward shareholders with a special interim dividend of 0.5 pence per share, taking the total interim dividend to 5.0 pence per share.

Looking ahead, the Group is well placed with continued opportunities to grow.

We have a strong balance sheet and good cash generation which provides options to how we allocate our capital.”

The Equity

There are some 32.05m shares in issue.

The larger holders include TrinityBridge (9.93%), Downing (8.05%), Otus Capital Management (4.93%), Peter Kenyon, CEO (3.60%), Stephen Burton (2.70%), Michael Johnson (1.68%), Martin Clyburn, CFO (0.65%), Chelverton Asset Management (0.62%), Andrew Meehan (0.60%) and Jason Carr (0.39%).

Broker’s View

The trio of analysts at Panmure Liberum – James Allen, Rai Maile, and Ross Luckman, rate the group’s share as a Buy, having increased their Target Price in June to 385p (340p).

They estimate that the end-September 2025 results will show £109.0m (£96.0m) sales, with pre-tax profits leaping from £11.4m to £15.4m, hoisting earnings to 34.3p (25.7p) and enabling an increase in dividend to 14.0p (11.2p) per share.

For the new year they see £112.0m sales, £14.4m profits, 32.0p earnings and a 13.8p per share dividend – which I reckon will be soon uprated.

In My View

There is so much expansion potential for this group, in the UK there are over 350 locations with a population of 30,000 – at just six to eight a year, I reckon that there is a couple of decades in which to achieve such a target.

The rise in the price of gold, silver and other precious metals in this last year will have benefitted the group significantly.

And it could so easily carry on doing so in this new year.

The shares at 375p offer massive upside – on a market average of 18 times that would see the shares at 666p – perhaps far too high a rating just yet.

However – just 15 times would see 517p a share!