In Addition To The British Topshop Parent Company, Many Overseas Markets Must Be Abandoned.

Sex scandals, closing stores, restructuring, layoffs...

The bad news of Arcadia group, the parent company of Topshop, a high street brand, has not been over yet.

Recently, according to the Sunday telegraph, Arcadia group may have plans to close stores in the US, Australia, Germany, Holland and Ireland.

In November 2018 last year, the group had released news that it would close 1/3 stores in the UK.

This means that in addition to the domestic market of Arcadia group, the overseas market is also disintegrating.

At present, apart from 500 stores in the UK, Arcadia group's fashion retailers including Topman, Topshop, Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Miss Selfridge and Wallis have entered 36 countries in the world, with 1170 stores, most of which are franchised stores.

But Arcadia group's overseas market performance has been poor.

For example, Arcadia group has entered the US market for ten years. In 2012, it sold 25% of local businesses to Leonard Green, an investment company, but it has been developing slowly, and there are only 15 shops.

In 2017, the group's head brand Topshop went bankrupt in Australia and closed all its stores. Now the whole group has only three stores in the region.

Not to mention, 4 years ago, the group had completely withdrawn from the Japanese market.

Although Arcadia group did not disclose the sales volume of various countries, its 2017 fiscal year results showed that the international sales of the group fell by nearly 20% to 241 million 500 thousand pounds during the same period.

Such a sharp drop is not related to the overall decline of the group in that year.

That year, the loss of group head brand Topshop reached 10 million 900 thousand pounds, group sales fell 5.3% to 1 billion 900 million pounds compared with the same period last year, and profits plunged 42% to 124 million pounds.

This situation was not reversed in 2018, but even more withdrawn from China, one of the most important markets for fashion brands.

In August 2018, Topshop announced the early termination of cooperation with the Chinese agent Shang pin network, and announced the closure of Tmall flagship store and began clearance.

At the same time, all the stocks of the brand have begun to clear up.

For a while, Topshop's most popular jeans were almost robbed, and netizens pushed the news onto micro-blog's hot search: "I thought it was a new set of double eleven!"

After closing the channel of Tmall store and the Shang pin network, Topshop has already left the Chinese market, because it has not even opened a physical store since it entered the Chinese market in 2016.

Just two months later, the Group Chairman Philip Green was also accused of sexual assault and racial discrimination, which directly led to a sharp decline in the group image.

Even Beyonce, through her name, Parkwood Entertainment, bought the full share of Ivy Park, a sports apparel brand co founded with Topshop, and completely split the brand and the scandal tainted Green.

Topshop's failure in overseas markets over the years has been attributed to common reasons such as strong competitors, high rents, and fast fashion industry downturn.

But if Arcadia group withdraws from many overseas markets, its brand's international business will be more seriously threatened.

But this may be unavoidable, because last month, the Arcadia group was hit by a restructuring plan, and closing and layoffs were important parts of the plan.

"In view of the challenges in the retail market and the continuing pressure on fashion brands in the UK, we have explored a number of ways to enable companies to operate in a more efficient way," Arcadia group said in a statement.

But at the moment, the group is still going downhill.

Author: Jia Lin Wei