News Bureau

January 19, 2019

Tiffany Holiday Period Sales declined

Update 1: Tiffany & Co reported its sales results for the two months (holiday period) ended December 31, 2018. Worldwide net sales declined 1% to $1.04 billion and comparable sales declined 2%. However, on a constant-exchange-rate basis that excludes the effect of translating foreign-currency-denominated sales into U.S. dollars, both net sales and comparable sales were equal to the prior year.

Management updated its outlook for the year ending January 31, 2019 (fiscal 2018) and provided preliminary guidance for fiscal 2019.

Alessandro Bogliolo, Chief Executive Officer, said, “With continued strong sales growth in mainland China (by a double-digit percentage), solid results in Japan and healthy growth in global ecommerce sales, overall holiday sales results came in short of our expectations which had called for modest year-over-year growth.

We attribute the difference partly to lower sales to foreign (primarily Chinese) tourists globally, and to softening demand attributed to local customers in the Americas and Europe, which we believe may have been influenced more than expected by external events, uncertainties and market volatilities.”

Mr. Bogliolo added, “As I reflect on 2018, we accomplished what we set out to achieve. By increasing the levels of strategic investment spending in certain areas, we recovered lost ground from several years of soft sales trends and we expect to report record levels of net sales and net earnings in fiscal 2018. Now the focus is to grow to new heights.

To this purpose, we will continue to pursue the six key strategic priorities we introduced earlier in 2018 which will require our on-going effort and commitment for years to come. We are excited about making further meaningful progress on this journey in 2019, with plans for new product launches, an evolved marketing message, store expansions and website enhancements.

We acknowledge that external pressures, difficult year-over-year sales comparisons and annualized internal spending are expected to have some negative effects on fiscal 2019 results, mostly in the first half of the year, but we believe that Tiffany is on a solid path for improved sales, margins, earnings and cash flow generation over the long-term.”

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