The encyclopedia · Finance & Accounting · Strategic decision · 2024–2025
Burberry swung to a £66M loss and is cutting 1,700 jobs to fund the reset
Revenue fell 17% and last year's £383M profit became a £66M loss. The new CEO's Burberry Forward plan saves £100m — at the cost of ~1,700 jobs.
Burberry · 2025-05-14
What happened
For the 52 weeks to 29 March 2025, Burberry's revenue fell 17% as reported to £2,461 million, with comparable sales down 12% — including a 20% collapse in the first half. Adjusted operating profit fell from £418 million to £26 million; below that, the group swung from a £383 million pre-tax profit to a £66 million reported loss. Wholesale revenue fell 37%, and the dividend — 61.0p a year earlier — was suspended.
The board had already changed course. In July 2024 Joshua Schulman, formerly of Coach and Jimmy Choo, took over as CEO with a turnaround mandate. In November 2024 he launched 'Burberry Forward': a return to the trench coat and the scarf — 'timeless British luxury' — backed by a £40 million savings programme, later extended by £60 million to £100 million of annualised savings by FY27.
On 14 May 2025, with the results, Burberry announced that around 1,700 roles — almost a fifth of a workforce of about 9,300 — could go by 2027: mostly head-office positions led by London, reorganised store rotas, and the entire night shift at the Castleford trench-coat factory in Yorkshire, about 170 posts. Shares jumped 17% on the day.
The market was paying for honesty as much as for cuts: a British institution had just posted its first loss in years, and the plan to fix it was to shrink back to what it does best.
Why it happened
- Years of repositioning spent the brand's equity without replacing the demand — by FY25 comparable sales had fallen 12% for the year and 20% in the first half alone
- Wholesale collapsed 37% as the group's partners pulled back, showing the decline was channel-wide, not a single market problem
- The turnaround arrived as job cuts because the costs had been built for a revenue level Burberry no longer had: the £100m savings programme is the difference between the two
- Suspending the dividend and absorbing a £66m loss reset the baseline — but only after the strategy that required both had already failed
The lesson
When a heritage brand spends years chasing a new identity and demand falls away, the bill is paid twice: once in the loss, and again in the workforce that was hired for the growth that never came.
Aftermath
Burberry Forward continues into FY26–FY27, targeting £100 million of annualised savings, with most of the 1,700 role reductions concentrated in head offices. H2 FY25 comparables improved to -5% from -20%, and the shares' 17% jump showed investors backing the retreat to heritage. The trench coat, demoted for years, is the strategy again.
Sources
- The Guardian — Burberry may cut 1,700 jobs globally to reduce costs as profits fall (14 May 2025)
- Burberry Group plc — Preliminary Results 2024/2025 press release (14 May 2025, via MarketScreener)
- Fashion Dive — Burberry plans 1,700 job cuts as revenue sinks (14 May 2025)
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