Asos passes an important landmark

We’re used to stellar trading updates from Asos but today’s deserves special comment because the company reached the milestone of achieving more than 50% of its sales outside the UK. That’s not to say that the UK isn’t still growing - it is, with sales up 24% in Q4 - but that international sales are growing quicker, up 161% in the period.

Asos is a nice business run by nice people - they’re actually based in the same building as us and we often see CEO Nick Robertson and his colleagues around the place - but behind the very down-to-earth exterior is a phenomenal machine. While everyone is - quite rightly - having a go at selling online, there is a real science to it and Asos has built on its first mover advantage (having started selling online when more established fashion retailers were still saying it wouldn’t work) to create a highly sophisticated world-class operation.

One of the real advantages of online retailing is that once you’re doing it successfully in one country, there’s no reason why you can’t do it in others. There are still some complexities, like customs for example, but because you don’t have all the aggravation of opening stores and recruiting people to work in them, it’s much easier than for bricks and mortar retailers.

Asos is a great British success story and arguably the leading online fashion retailer in the world. No matter how high the share price has gone, they’ve consistently proved the doubters wrong, and while the UK growth will inevitably flatten out at some point, there is masses to go for overseas. In fact it’s not fanciful to say that Asos could become an Amazon of fashion - or that Amazon, or another online giant, wouldn’t want to come in and buy it. There’s a lot of potential priced into the shares, but when it comes to delivering on potential, the Asos management has consistently shown it is second to none.