After Q2, jeweller Jubilee foresees glittering future

Chief financial officer Unyarat Pornprakit said Jubilee was able to achieve 40-per-cent growth in net profit and 33-per-cent growth in revenue year on year in the second quarter, despite the country’s political turmoil and the fact that the quarter is normally a low season. The good performance was chiefly due to marketing campaigns and new collections launched by the firm this year.

Sales had already begun to recover a month before the resumption of political stability after the military coup was staged on May 22, she said.

Jubilee has more than 25 per cent of the diamond-jewellery trade at counters in shopping malls and 7 per cent of the total market in Thailand.

Unyarat told participants at the Stock Exchange of Thailand’s Opportunity Day event yesterday that Jubilee had maintained its target of 20-per-cent sales growth this year and saw room to expand its market penetration further.

“At present, our customers are the B+ group and up. A new consumer lifestyle that is in favour of luxury products and growing offers of financing packages will help us increase our chance to expand [our target customer groups]. There is also the continued appetite of investors upcountry, which will fuel the expansion of malls in major cities,” she said.

Jubilee will open its first flagship store in a four-storey building with total space of 1,500 square metres on Silom Road in downtown Bangkok by the end of this month. The flagship store is aimed at eventually making foreign tourists account for half of its customers, a big shift from the current situation, where Thai customers constitute more than 90 per cent of buyers at its counters in shopping malls.

Unyarat said Jubilee would wait to see the performance of its flagship store before deciding to open more standalone outlets in the future. It is also planning to launch a new brand to capture younger customers by the end of this year.

The company plans to increase the number of its retail outlets to 130 by year-end, from 115 at present and 108 last year. The expansion will be accelerated with the aim of doubling the number of outlets to 200 within two years.

Nevertheless, Unyarat said Jubilee expected its same-store sales to expand by 12-14 per cent this year, continuing to fuel much of its growth, supplemented by sales from new outlets.

Enduring many crises and achieving 300-per-cent sales growth during the past five years, Jubilee still sees a lot of room to expand by no less than 20 per cent per annum over the next three to four years, since it still has a small share in the overall market, she said. 

Despite the opening of the flagship store, Jubilee expects to maintain its gross margin at more than 40 per cent and net margin between 13 and 15 per cent this year. 

During the first half of this year, Jubilee booked 18-per-cent growth in revenue to Bt829 million, and a 10-per-cent rise in net profit to Bt109 million. Operating profit also grew by 10 per cent to Bt137 million.