H&M sales fell by around one percent to around 20.5 billion euros in the last financial year 2023/24 (November 30), partly due to the strong domestic currency. This corresponds to a decrease of one percent compared to the previous year. When adjusted for currency effects, revenue however increased by one percent, but was still significantly less than experts had expected.
By contrast, the operating result was slightly better than expected. H&M was able to report significant progress in terms of profit. Thanks to lower costs, the operating result in the previous financial year rose by almost a fifth to 1.5 billion euros. This was slightly more than analysts had expected. Overall, the Group earned 1 billion euros, a third more than a year ago.
In the first few weeks of the current financial year, initial results already show considerable improvement. Between December 1 and January 28, sales increased by four percent in constant currency.
During 2024, the company made significant improvements, prioritizing the H&M product offering, with an initial focus on womenswear, where we increased our trend responsiveness and overall assortment relevance. In the fourth quarter, full price selling of womenswear increased in all channels, shared CEO Daniel Ervér.
“We accelerated the pace of improvements to our supply chain, increasing flexibility and product availability across channels. For example, we continue to deepen partnerships with our suppliers, shorten our product development process starting with womenswear, improve our demand forecasting, further develop our nearshoring capacity, and expand the use of RFID,” explained Ervér.
Recently, H&M has also been simplifying team structures to build an even more efficient organisation. To streamline and optimize operations, Afound was discontinued during the year. In 2025, H&M plans to integrate the Monki brand into Weekday, both in stores and online.
In the past financial year, H&M opened 88 new stores and continued to optimize its store portfolio. With more than 4,200 stores, upgrading the store portfolio will remain a priority for the retailer.
“As we look ahead to 2025, we will continue to strengthen our core business and elevate our customer offering, while continuing the strong work on cost efficiency. We speed up our product creation processes, increase the precision in aligning supply with demand, and improve the product availability for our customers online as well as in stores by integrating both channels more closely with each other,” added Ervér.
