Safestyle shares plunge and chairman quits amid ‘significant’ profit warning
24th April 2018

Shares in Safestyle plummeted by over a quarter in value after the company cancelled its expected dividend and announced the resignation of chairman Steve Halbert along with a warning of 2018 profits ‘significantly below market expectations’.

The company once again laid blame on ‘an aggressive new market entrant’ understood to be Safeglaze, a me-too operation headquartered half a mile away from the Bradford company’s own base that has boasted ‘Our competitors are scared and they should be’ Read Story.

Shares fell 22% to 62.67p following the news yesterday (Apr 23), then further to below 57p today. The company announced that it is cancelling its planned final dividend of 7.5p per share and has appointed Peter Richardson, an existing director, as chairman in succession to Steve Halbert.

The company added in yesterday’s trading update that its new competitor's actions were impacting the Group in certain areas of its operations, particularly in relation to its Sales and Canvass divisions. As a result, the Group's order intake in 2018 to date had been weak and its market share was under pressure. 

Five weeks ago, The Glazine revealed that two directors had recently left Safestyle, one of them directly to Safeglaze and the other, Technical Director Mark Scaife, who joined Customade Group as COO. A week later, in the company’s 2017 final results, along with a profits fall of 29% it announced the imminent departure of another boardroom figure, CFO Mike Robinson Read More. In the same report, CEO Steve Birmingham announced: “For the first time, orders generated from our digital activities and direct response channels exceeded those from other sources and accounted for 47% of all business in 2017 compared to 41% in 2016. Our intention is to build on this foundation and continue to invest in our technology and digital activities.”

The newcomer Safeglaze UK is the trading name of Niamac Developments Ltd which, according to Companies House, recently appointed as company secretary Miss Aarti Rani Misra, believed to be the daughter of Mitu Misra, the original founder of Safestyle.

Meanwhile, Misra himself, who floated Safestyle on the Stock Exchange in 2013, went on to make his name in movies as writer and director of ‘Lies We Tell’ which premiered in February in London’s Leicester Square with stars including Gabriel Byrne and Harvey Keitel.

April has not gone well for Safestyle so far. Earlier in the month it was announced that the company had been fined £850,000 after an investigation by the UK Health & Safety Executive into one of two accidents in 2017, in which a contractor suffered a knee injury. Investigations into the other incident are still ongoing.