ASOS have dropped quite significantly in the past week for no particular reason and I view this as the perfect opportunity to invest as I can see them bouncing right back up to the 5.50p mark in the next 2-3 weeks. STRONG BUY!!

Asos outstrips retail rivals
By Robert Orr and Neil Hume

Published: February 13 2008 02:00 | Last updated: February 13 2008 02:00

Asos continued to outperform the struggling retail sector as Landsbanki lifted its price target on the online clothing group to 285p.

Asos was one of the sector's few success stories this Christmas, reporting sales growth of 86 per cent. Although Asos shares already trade at a sharp premium to the sector, Landsbanki said the valuation was deserved.

"Asos is a growth stock and offers direct exposure to internet retail, the growth segment of the sector," the broker wrote. Asos closed up 3.4 per cent at 246p, not far off its all-time high

266 now which is lvl with all time high

Lovely grub! All time high, again. Who was the guy -Fibonacci? Onto the third leg of an ascent which should take us to 300p. Hold on for the ride, guys and gals!

Eric

agree eric looks like sooner rather then later

Zoe Wood
The Observer, Sunday February 24 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/24/amazon.efinance

Nick Robertson, the founder of fast-growing web retailer Asos, wants to create the Amazon of the online clothes industry, he tells Zoe Wood

Asos chief executive Nick Robertson is sick of being linked to Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton in the newspapers. But the chief executive of the 'celebrity-inspired' fashion website is a victim of sexism in the City - the need for business editors to leaven weighty coverage of sub-prime mortgages and monoline insurers with a spirit-lifting picture of a 20-year-old in a thigh-skimming mini-dress. 'It's like groundhog day,' says Robertson of the media coverage his trading updates attract.

But if Robertson is weary of it, there is no sign that women are getting tired of scouring the website to bag the latest celebrity trends, with the retailer reporting sales growth of nearly 90 per cent at Christmas. Analysts are now talking about the company's potential to be the 'Amazon of fashion'.

And even if Robertson objects to the fallout, there is no doubt Asos is a business built on skimpy attire worn by glamorous girls. At any one time the website has around 500 dresses to choose from, with the selection changing every six to eight weeks. Shoppers can search by their favourite celebrity as well as by style and currently its teen clientele can snap up a 38 lace dress inspired by one worn by actress Mischa Barton, or a 28 floral number la Ms Hilton.

After its spectacular Christmas performance, the weight of expectation in the City is high, but Robertson claims he is not nervous about the business's ability to maintain momentum. 'We have grown at this level for six years and there is a lot more riding in our favour now; internet shopping is more exciting and the Asos brand is a lot bigger.'

He says the attention Asos has received belies its size - after all, with sales of around 80m, its turnover is only equal to that of Topshop's flagship store at Oxford Circus. 'We are tiny,' he says.

The rapid growth of Asos, formerly 'As Seen on Screen', appears to have surprised its management. It has moved warehouses five times in seven years and is now scrabbling for more space at its trendy Art Deco London headquarters. But Robertson says its most recent move should do for several years, as it can handle sales volumes of up to 350m.

Robertson is the great-grandson of menswear retailer Austin Reed, but he is adamant he is more of an entrepreneur, like his brother Nigel who founded telephone information group Freepages. 'Retail is product and packaging: my experience is more on the packaging side,' he says.

The company's roots lie in product-placement business Entertainment Marketing, which Robertson started with Quentin Griffiths in 1995 with the aim of getting brands such as Carlsberg and Pepsi into films and television shows. The plan was to create an online shop for a variety of products 'as seen on screen', but it became apparent the real opportunity was in clothing.

'We decided to be about selling the fashion people see on celebrities, not just in the movies and on TV, but in music videos and in magazines,' he says. Asos was born in 2000 and the following year the business, chaired by Lord (Waheed) Alli, was admitted to the Alternative Investment Market.

'We have evolved from 2001 when it was all about products you saw on screen,' says Robertson. 'Celebrity is still at the heart of this business but we've got more authoritative and professional about the way it is packaged.'

Robertson gets annoyed if you apply traditional retail logic to his business. When asked about the typically lower margins achieved selling third-party brands versus own-label goods, he says: 'Some analysts are stuck in the Dark Ages. Can I just spell it out? We are not a shop. This is an internet site with more stuff on it than you can shake a stick at.

'I don't think Amazon is worried about margin as they are making a smaller margin on a much bigger turnover - and that's the principle we would apply. If I'm a shop I have to make a return per square foot, but the only cost to me is the 4.50 per square foot it costs me to keep goods in my warehouse.'

Robertson also becomes agitated when the subject turns to the potential of clothes shopping online - given, it is argued, that some women will always prefer shopping on the high street where they can touch fabrics and try on items. He makes the 'whatever' sign using his thumbs and forefingers. 'Every month 51 per cent of 16-to-24-year-old girls buy clothes online,' he says. 'Get over the f***ing trying-on thing.' Convenience is why people buy on the web, he continues. 'Have you tried queuing up in Zara on a Saturday afternoon?'

Such is the demand for internet fashion, he says, that the business would grow at 40 per cent a year even if the site did not evolve. So far it has only scratched the surface: just 1.7 million of a possible 14 million target audience of 16-to-34-year-old women use the site. Kaupthing analyst Matthew McEachran estimates that the company, which has expanded into menswear, is addressing a potential 60bn market.

Robertson has described the typical Asos customer as: '23, better looking than average, with Saturday night as her biggest night of the week'.

If you were to look in such a woman's wardrobe, he goes on, 'it probably contains some items from eBay, TK Maxx, some own-label clothes as well as premium and luxury brands,' he says. 'So we have been taking all these high street, premium and luxury brands under one roof, because from a customer perspective that appears to be what she wants.'

Asos has bolstered its credibility with wealthier shoppers by stocking designer ranges such as McQ by Alexander McQueen and Twenty8Twelve, the range designed by actress Sienna Miller. Robertson says getting brands on board is like a 'domino effect', and the next stage is to add more luxury products to the roster - although shoppers can already buy a 720 Miu Miu bag, as seen on Keira Knightley.

As the business grows, he says Asos will seek to create a more personal shopping experience. 'When you visit Amazon you get a completely different home page to me, so apply that to fashion,' he says. 'We will be able to profile the customer through their shopping and browsing habits... so an older person with more disposable income will see more premium product.'

The potential Asos has shown in its short life as a listed firm has led to speculation that it could be bought - but Robertson scotches that, adding that between management, Fidelity and hedge fund manager Bill Currie, 40 per cent of the group's shares are spoken for. Instead, he is concentrating on strengthening its position, as rivals move from the high street to fight for sales on the net. Like Lastminute.com's co-founder Brent Hoberman, he sees the potential for internet 'superbrands', with retailers' wares all displayed under one 'roof'.

'On the internet, shoppers prefer to go to a smaller number of bigger places and Amazon is obviously the pinnacle of that,' says Robertson. 'A girl walking down Oxford Street may go to 10 or 15 different shops - but she doesn't want that hassle on the internet.'

any rumours about i do not know of? sp raced up 12-13 pts in last hour

the company had a plug on bbc working lunch

PLEASED ABOUT IT BUT is that all it takes? May be they can do the same for WNG and SEO

robin it might not be that but it should help

From The Times
February 29, 2008
Fresh blow for Topshop as Asos poaches director
Steve Hawkes

One of Sir Philip Green's most senior lieutenants at Topshop has left the high street fashion chain and joined Asos, the fast-growing internet clothing retailer.

In the latest defection to hit the billionaire, Caren Downie will head the women's wear team at Asos as it launches nearly 3,000 more product lines this year. Ms Downie has been credited with bringing a new generation of designers into Topshop in her role as buying director.
Ms Downie will oversee a 40 per cent expansion in the women's wear range at Asos and drive new creative projects.

Asos was one of the big winners in the retail sector over Christmas. Sales rose by nearly 90 per cent. It believes annual revenue could hit 400 million by 2011, a fourfold increase, as younger shoppers flock to the web

Asos has appointed Topshop buying director Caren Downie to lead a massive expansion of its offer this year.

Downie, who was a key member of the Topshop team during the era of Jane Shepherdson, will join in the newly created role of womenswear buying director.

She will oversee Asos's ownbrand womenswear and accessories, as well as its branded ranges, and has been tasked with increasing the 6,500-line offer by 30% to 40% this year. Downie will head a team of 70, which is set to double by December.

Downie's appointment marks a significant investment by Asos in its new strategy as it shifts away from its celebrity-fashion roots towards becoming a fullyfledged fashion etailer, offering everything from fast fashion to designer brands such as Miu Miu and PPQ.

Asos is thought to be anxious to maintain its position at the forefront of etail as more high street chains join the online revolution, with home shopping groups such as Littlewoods, Next and Otto Group also playing catch up.

Asos chief executive Nick Robertson told Drapers that Downie would also drive new creative projects to nurture upand-coming designers. Downie was hugely infl uential on Topshop's New Generation sponsorship of London Fashion Week designers, and is likely to exploit her links with the London College of Fashion to diff erentiate Asos from its rivals.

Downie, who has worked at Topshop for more than a decade, said: "Asos has proved to be a very successful etailer. My previous experience will fi t in well, because fast fashion is only getting faster and an internet model is a perfect environment in which to showcase this."

Asos product and trading director Rob Bready said: "Caren will bring a dynamic fashion edge to Asos, which puts us in a strong position for the future."

reason for todays rise.

ASOS 267 up 4

Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander 'buy' with 310 pence target

no news as far as i know , but asc now trading at new all time highs

wow 280 now. WHAT IS GOING ON????

robin looks like it is going into the aim 100 index at the next review

500p target next 2 years.

taken from elsewhere.
Asos note from Kaupthing

PM: A trip to HQ leads us to believe a number of growth initiatives we recently speculated about (note, 11 February) could come sooner rather than later. ASOSs position as the leading pure play e-tailer is likely to be cemented further in our view. With forward growth rates conservatively struck we see scope for more upgrades over the next 6 months and are upgrading our target price to 350p from 310p.
Investor Visit To HQ Puts Spotlight on Growth Opportunity
Yesterday we accompanied investors on a very impressive site visit to its HQ. The CEO and FD were clearly upbeat about ASOSs prospects. There is a pre-close trading update due towards the end of April and prelims are in June. Upgrades are a possibility. Based on current conservative projections, the stock is trading on 23.5x to March 2009, falling to 17x and 12x thereafter. This is not a high street retailer and as such has completely different financial dynamics. Prior to any upgrades, the 3 year CAGR (EPS) is over 50% and cash is being generated. Despite recent strength this remains a key pick and ahead of upcoming news we are upgrading our price target by 13% to 350p.
Organic Growth Rates to Benefit From New Initiatives
ASOS believes the 3 core planks to success are Choice, Presentation and Delivery (including Returns). They have worked hard on all these areas and find themselves moving ahead of the competition, which in terms of pure play e-tailing is surprisingly thin. Online shopping behaviour plays into the hands of ASOS and, as the offer continues to broaden out, their competitive advantage will be cemented further. New technology development will soon enable customer personalisation, aiding customer expansion. ASOS currently has relatively few customers and low average spend metrics - both are set for substantial growth on the back of this very scaleable high margin model.
The UK clothing market is worth 40bn. Surveys indicate online could take 10% of this in time. Online Retail is all about being a 1-stop-shop as evidenced by the success of eBay/Amazon and ASOS has the scope to be the fashion equivalent. It is already the second most visited UK fashion website, and the platform is extremely scaleable. They will continue to broaden the product offer, adding new product categories, a clearance channel and even auctions. ASOS has been successfully enhancing its management team. Caren Downie, ex Top Shop, is the latest hire. There are more on the way to drive the growth.
Possible next steps include Free Returns, which may lift returns rates to c30% but could generate an extra 15-20% of sales. A separate Brand Clearance site could offer a strong online alternative to TK Maxx (>1bn sales). New resource in CRM means they are about to become a lot more potent in how they segment customers and market directly. Overseas deliveries represent 10% of sales already, despite no marketing effort. Given ASOS can replicate the platform, International could add value in the future. Ongoing investment in growth and expansion of the teams means an HQ move is likely in 2008.

the share price down around 20% over the last 10 days,i put it down to selling before the end of the tax year.any other views?

Carol Midgley
E-tail, if were honest, is one of those unfortunate words that inspires in most of us a big, involuntary yawn. Equally spirit-sinking is the phrase fashion e-tail, evoking as it does images of draughty warehouses in Walsall posting out cheap frocks to the under-21s.

And then there is asos.com. This, in the unlikely event that you didnt know, is the online fashion store that was founded on making a virtue out of reproducing the outfits of heat magazine celebrities such as Sienna Miller and Paris Hilton, and knocking them out at a fraction of the price. Nothing that has happened to asos.com in the seven years that it has existed can truthfully be described as dull. The business has become something of an online fashion phenomenon, second in size only to the mighty Next.co.uk, and is changing all preconceptions about dreary old e-tail.

What started as a smallish operation selling pink faux-fur gilets in the style of Jennifer Ellison (ASOS stands for as seen on screen) is now a multimillion-pound business that has doubled its turnover virtually every year since 2000. The gross retail sales for last year were 115 million and, at Christmas, when many high-street retailers were weeping into their groaning sales rails, asos.com recorded an 86 per cent increase in sales in the seven weeks to January 20, not just bucking the trend but blowing a raspberry in its face. In another coup, it recently poached Caren Downie, Topshops buying director, who joins ASOS as buying director of womenswear. Fast fashion is only getting faster, and an internet model is a perfect environment in which to showcase this, she says.

Given this rosy picture, its not surprising to find that the companys new headquarters is in a great, swanky building, Greater London House, in north London, where it occupies an entire floor and seems to be teeming with staff (ASOS employs 270 people). One of the first faces I see when I go in is that of Melanie Blatt, the All Saints singer, who is browsing through samples from its new spring collection. Thats a turn-up, eh? A company that began by tapping into the national fixation with celebrity now appears to be attracting the celebrities themselves.

If you have ever used the website, which I have many times, then you will know that its two main plus points are the speed with which it keeps up with fashion, and the sheer amount of choice available. At any one time there are more than 400 styles of dresses alone on the website, not to mention mountains of tops, trousers, shoes, bags, lingerie, swimwear and jewellery (there are 4,500 products in all), and an entire mens section, all of which is modelled by people walking on a real catwalk.

You can search via your chosen celebritys style Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham are the most clicked celebs, by the way or just via day or eveningwear. More recently, in a development that signals its growing confidence, ASOS has diversified from merely copying the rich and famous and now offers its own luxury brand, together with well-established labels such as Antik Batik, Pinko, Rock & Republic, Public Beware, Christian Dior, Ted Baker, Just Cavalli, American Retro and Miss Sixty. ASOS also sells a few Balenciaga bags per month (though, speaking personally, if I was lashing out 800 on a posh bag, I think Id want the sales-assistants-sucking-up-to-me experience that goes with it).

According to Robert Bready, the retail director, about 46,000 orders are sent out every week. Normally, 200 new items are added to the website every week. In the run-up to Christmas, that figure is nearer 400 a week. The goods are posted out from a huge warehouse in Hemel Hempstead, to customers who find they prefer clothes shopping from their armchair to traipsing the rain-sodden high streets of Britain. It is only two years ago that the main warehouse was hit by a huge fire that destroyed 5.5 million of ASOS stock. Despite this ruining Christmas trading in 2005, and putting the company out of action for weeks, it had bounced back within six months.

Ill be frank and say that when I used ASOS in the very early days, the results were hit and miss. Sometimes the clothes that arrived were great; sometimes they were made of such crackly material that you were afraid to stand too close to the fire. Neither did all of them look very much like the original inspiration. But the quality has improved noticeably in recent years. Bready says much work has been done to this effect: garment technicians have been hired and specialists brought in from Karen Millen to oversee quality control. The market has responded enthusiastically; the website receives two million hits a month. The average per order is 50.

The biggest advantage for us is that we dont have bricks and mortar premises, says Bready. While other buyers [on the high street] have to go to the Far East to get better margins and it can take weeks just to ship the stuff and get it ready to display in a shop, we dont have to operate to the same margins. We are able to use factories in Europe, so our production times are much faster. This can mean that from spotting, say, Lily Allen wearing a new style of dress on the street one day, ASOS buyers and designers are in a position to have similar ones made and ready to sell in four weeks.

But surely the other big advantage to this is an ethical one? As increasing numbers of consumers become guilt-stricken about sweatshop practices in countries such as Bangladesh, then this is something ASOS could be shouting about. Bready says that 60 to 70 per cent of its stock is made in Europe, which is something that I would be putting on posters. But ASOS has as yet done relatively little advertising because, as Bready says, they wanted to get the product right first.

The idea for the company came from its chief executive, Nick Robertson the grandson of Austin Reed and his business partner at the time, Quentin Griffiths. Theyd read about a particular lamp that had appeared in Friends and inspired more than 20,000 viewers to call NBC asking where they could buy it. It was at the time when there was an explosion of new celebrity magazines, and Robertson noticed that many of them were pointing out to readers where they could buy similar outfits to those sported by stars such as Victoria Beckham thus directing people to spend their money somewhere else without even getting commission for it. Robertson decided to earn that commission and, in the early days, ASOS would offer clothes in the style of a certain star. Robertson has developed the range since then and asos.com now offers high street and luxury brands.

In one of the side rooms at the HQ, Mariel, a striking blonde model, is striding up and down the catwalk in a silver minidress and Terry de Havilland shoes while a photographer shoots away. The catwalk has become a permanent fixture; when it was introduced a couple of years ago, sales promptly soared. The moving image, says Bready, brought the clothes to life. Scores of such pictures a day are uploaded to keep the website fresh and intriguing. Sameera Hassan, the companys publicist, says many customers log on twice a day. Our typical girl lives and breathes fashion, she says. The most-clicked section is called Just Arrived; what is in Just Arrived at the beginning of the day is different to that at the end of the day.

Of course, what really matters is hard sales. In a high-street shop, 20 per cent of customers on average buy something. When it comes to online retail, the figure drops significantly: around 2.5 out of every 100 browsers will buy. Then there are returns: an average catalogue company experiences about 40 per cent returns. But asos.com seems to be bucking the trend on both these counts. Bready says that its conversion rate ie, the number of visitors to the site who buy is 6 per cent and, at sale times, nearer 10 per cent. Meanwhile, its level of returns is much lower about 22 per cent.

The rise of ASOS has been so rapid that there must come a point when its success will plateau (it was named Fashion E-tailer of the Year at both the 2005 and 2006 Drapers Awards). The company is confident, however, that growth will continue in 2008, a prediction that already seems correct despite a possible recession. Robertson goes so far as to say, If there is a spending squeeze, for a business growing at this rate we can afford to lose 10 per cent of sales. Im full of confidence about the year ahead.

This is partly because online shopping is continuing to grow in popularity, and partly because ASOS is introducing new categories (maternitywear, petites) which it believes will drive further expansion. One tool that will help this is the asos.com magazine, a glossy handbag-sized affair that features a different style heroine each month (Mischa Barton, Victoria Beckham, Rachel Bilson and Lindsay Lohan are among recent cover queens) and goes out free to 400,000 customers. There is a regular Style Stalker page that tracks a particular celebrity down to their last accessory. Joining it soon is a mens version, which will come out twice a year.

Aside from increased household access to broadband, the celebrity gimmick has been pivotal for ASOS, and not only because it has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of celebrity-driven reality TV and magazines. Celebrities come in and out of vogue; they evolve and change, but there have always been and always will be fashion icons, says Bready. If people see a celebrity wearing something, it gives them the confidence to wear it, too. What a pity that we cant buy the skinny hips to match.