Big Yellow announces jump in pre-tax profits

Big Yellow Self Storage, one of the UK’s largest and best-known self storage brands, has announced a jump in pre-tax profits for the six months that ended on 30 September 2012. The group made a total pre-tax profit of £27.2 million, compared to £6.4 million during the same period last year.

Strong figures

This result was just one among a slew of strong figures announced by Big Yellow Self Storage as part of these results.

Occupancy – one of the most fundamental concerns of any self storage business – grew by 243,000 sq ft across their entire portfolio of stores, only a slight fall from the figure announced last year of 250,000 sq ft.

As a percentage, the 53 “wholly owned” stores run by Big Yellow are now 68.5% occupied, up by 5% from this time last year.

Big Yellow Self Storage has also achieved impressive growth in terms of how much money it generates per square foot from each of its stores, with an average revenue of £21.28 now being generated from each square foot of rented space – an impressive increase of 10.1% on the figure of £19.33 they achieved last year.

The fact that Big Yellow Self Storage was able to let out more self storage space to an increasing number of customers at a higher cost had a very positive impact upon revenues, with store revenues of £35.5 million being achieved during this six-month period. Again, this was nearly 10% higher than the same figure during the previous six months.

These impressive figures were also good news for shareholders, with the company announcing that basic shareholder earnings were up to 21.18 pence per share.

“Awareness of self storage continues to grow”

The Executive Chairman of Big Yellow Self Storage, Nicholas Vetch, announced that he was pleased with this set of results, despite cautioning that the company still had to grapple with substantial long-term factors affecting the rest of the self storage industry and the broader economy:

“This is a strong revenue and earnings performance in a challenging environment for consumer facing businesses such as ours.  Awareness of self storage continues to grow with the majority of our new customers using self storage for the first time.

“As previously indicated, the impact of higher interest costs and the imposition of VAT on storage will create a drag on the pace of earnings growth in the short term. Additionally, we believe the economy will remain subdued for some years to come. However, as ably demonstrated in these strong results, the strength of our brand, growing market awareness, and our concentration of stores in London and the South East will assist in meeting these challenges.”