Shares of York-based online music equipment retailer Gear4music fell 11% on Tuesday after it released interim results for the six months ended September 30, 2019.

The results showed pre-tax losses narrowed to £279,000 in the first half from £545,000 reported in August last year, and revenue increased by 16% to £49.4 million.

Gear4music CEO Andrew Wass said: “This has been an important period of balancing sales growth with our primary objective of improving gross margins and profitability, and I am pleased to report tangible evidence that we are making good progress in achieving that objective.

“Having grown our revenues by more than 350% over the last four years, our recent focus has been on ensuring that our operational infrastructure is able to keep pace with our increased scale, and I am very pleased with the progress we have made during the period in further developing our back-end systems and logistics platform. 

“Having made these improvements, we expect to rebalance our development resources back towards growth orientated projects from next year, which alongside further systems improvements, we are confident will deliver long term growth in profits and revenues.

“As we approach the Christmas trading period, we will remain focused on improving profitability rather than driving growth in market share, particularly in the UK where the market remains highly competitive.

“Having appropriately reconfigured the business, we now expect gross margins to be higher and revenues to be lower than previous guidance, reflecting our focus this year on building a sustainable platform for growth in all areas.

“We believe that this is the right strategy for the delivery of long-term shareholder value and we remain confident that the business is well-positioned to trade in line with our full year EBITDA expectations.”