Ultimate Products: a new CEO, an £800,000 sales rebuild, and a promise that growth starts at home

FY26 revenue fell 3% and adjusted profit 28% as the clearance division was shut — yet management says the remaining operating base could funnel £200m–£300m of sales through it

ULTP.L · Earnings Call · 2026-10-27

Day two on the job, and the story is a demolition site

Simon Harrison took over as Ultimate Products' chief executive on 2026-10-27 — literally the day of this call, seven weeks after joining as CEO designate. His first public appearance as CEO was not a strategy launch. It was a look back at a year in which the owner of Salter and Beldray deliberately shrank. Revenue fell 3% to £145m from £150m, gross margin slipped to 22.6% from 23.2%, adjusted EBITDA dropped 20% to just over £10m, adjusted profit before tax fell 28% to £6.3m and adjusted EPS fell 26%. The full-year dividend is 2.7p, a final 1.8p, paid at the 50% payout policy. No surprises were promised, and none were delivered. But underneath the flat headline sits one of the more consequential internal rebuilds a £50m-market-cap housewares wholesaler will ever attempt.

The clearance exit is the whole story, and management knows it

The single decision that explains every line of the P&L is the closure of the third-party clearance division. Chris Dent, the CFO, framed it as a choice between easy margin and a coherent brand:

we took the tough decision to close down our clearance division. That was a really tough decision for us to make for a business. One, as a CFO, I like it because it is relatively high margin, but also it was the historic core of the business that Simon Showman started 29 years ago.
Chris Dent, CFO · 2026-10-27

The arithmetic runs cleanly through the bridge: third-party clearance and white label down 60%, total branded sales up 2%, and discounters in Europe carrying branded growth at 64%. Proprietary brands reached £128m, up 5% year on year and still below the FY2023 peak of the air fryer boom. Strip out the divested activity and the company is a slower-growing, higher-quality brand business than it was twelve months ago — but at a materially lower profit level today.

An £800,000 reconstruction of the front end

The most expensive change, and the one that will decide whether this works, was the sales team. Management expected a few tweaks; it got a rebuild. Of the team in place in May 2025, two people remain. The cost was £800,000 of redundancy and recruitment, with most Fridays now a training day and external coaches brought in on negotiation and pricing. Dent was direct about why the old commercial structure had to go: “Previously we had siloed departments working alongside each other who did not always communicate very well and may have had overlapping and conflicting priorities.” — Chris Dent, CFO · 2026-10-27 The fix is a commercial triangle of brands, buying and sales — the first structural articulation of what "Home of Brands" is supposed to mean in practice. A CRM went live the day before this call; a £2m ERP programme follows, with a go-live planned for August 2027, deliberately placed pre-peak. There is a measurability gap, though. Asked which lead indicators prove the rebuild is working, Dent pointed to the order book, which runs 12–18 months ahead: “in the areas where we need to be returning to growth, specifically in the U.K. branded, that's where I'm starting to see the green shoots coming through.” — Chris Dent, CFO · 2026-10-27 "Green shoots" and a newly green sales force are not yet orders — and the UK, the company's core, fell 7%.

What management stopped saying — and the capacity claim that follows

Two silences matter. First, the old rainmaker-led sales model has vanished from the narrative entirely; the founder generation is now non-executive. Second, Harrison declined the obvious adjacency: “I don't think so at this precise moment in time, because we believe that Salter and Beldray can still do an awful lot more.” — Chris Dent, CFO · 2026-10-27 No brand acquisitions. Instead he wants Salter scaled in the UK first — despite a heritage back to 1716 — with Russell Hobbs (Russell Hobbs) acting as the door-opener into German supermarkets and Kleeneze kept as a secondary brand for channel management. The offsetting bet is operating leverage. Four years of Productivity gains — robotic process automation on sample ordering saving 19.5 hours a week, AI-checked manual translations saving £84,000 a year — have merely held admin costs flat against inflation. Now the claim is that the same base carries far more volume: “I could see us quite easily at the moment with only a couple more heads putting GBP 200 million to GBP 300 million of revenue through the operational capability that we have.” — Chris Dent, CFO · 2026-10-27 That is roughly double today's turnover. It is a genuine, quantified, and testable claim — and the company has not yet proved it can grow the top line at all. This is not a UK-only instinct. Across the recent reporting cohort, Dometic talked about the need to adapt capacity to a softer consumer, while Electrolux flagged weak consumer confidence in North America. Ultimate Products is running the same play as its bigger peers — shrink the cost base, wait for the demand side — with a smaller cushion.

The balance sheet, the buyback, and the flat guidance

Year-end net bank debt to adjusted EBITDA was 0.9x, but Dent was explicit that the board uses the 12-month rolling figure of 1.4x when weighing buybacks — a rare admission that the flattering number is a timing artefact. Working capital to net debt cover stood at a healthy 2.9x, and the balance sheet released cash as trading slowed. On cost, currency is fully back-to-back hedged, and freight is described as benign — spot around 2,900 versus roughly 2,600 paid — though Dent warned that freight contracts "are likely to get ripped up" if geopolitics shifts. Guidance for FY27 is simply flat, against "subdued consumer demands and geopolitical uncertainty."

The verdict

Ultimate Products has spent a year taking pain up front: sacrificing the high-margin clearance business, gutting and rebuilding a sales force, and absorbing £1m of exceptional ERP and AIM-move costs — all so the next CEO inherits a brand-led business rather than a liquidation channel. Harrison has said nothing about his own priorities yet, promising them only after he has met more colleagues and customers. That is the tension worth watching. The company has already spent the money and taken the writedown; what it has not yet shown is a single quarter of UK branded growth. Until the order book converts, the £200m–£300m capacity claim is a promise, not a plan — and at a market capitalisation of roughly £51m, the market is unlikely to pay for promises twice.