Moonpig boss unexpectedly steps down

Times

26-06-2025

The chief executive of Moonpig, the online greetings cards business, has stepped down after seven years, catching the City and his leadership team unawares.
The company's share price dropped by 9 per cent on Thursday as the market digested the unexpected news of Nickyl Raithatha's departure, which was delivered alongside the annual results.
Raithatha will serve out his 12-month notice period to ensure a smooth transition. 'It has been a great time in a business that I love and I want to leave on a high,' he said. 'I feel like I'll be able to do that with good momentum, good trading and a rock solid team. I'll miss it, but it should be a really strong platform for someone to come in and build on.'
The card retailer's reported profit before tax dropped 93 per cent to £3 million because of a £56.7 million charge representing a loss in value for its experiences division. It bought the Buyagift and Red Letter Days businesses from Otium Capital for £124 million in 2022 to cash in on what it saw as a shift from physical gifts towards experiences such as afternoon tea at Harrods or a day driving supercars on the Top Gear test track.
The unit, which marked the company's first acquisition since its £1.2 billion IPO in 2021, struggled as lower consumer confidence and economic challenges pushed down spending on gifts.
The company's ebitda earnings were £96.8 million, up 1.3 per cent, slightly above analyst expectations of £94 million. Its revenue of £350 million, up 2.6 per cent from the year before, was at the bottom end of the guidance, due to a slower second half with consumers less willing to pay for extras, such as choosing a larger card or adding a more expensive gift.
After the end of the financial year, sales growth bounced back with Moonpig's strongest Father's Day yet, the company said.
• Moonpig launches AI-driven handwriting tool
'There's a lot of uncertainty in the world so people are holding back,' Raithatha said. 'The good news for us is that we have managed to start growing gifting meaningfully, despite that consumer pullback, which we're really proud of internally.'
Moonpig was founded in 2000 by Nick Jenkins, a former commodity trader who named his company after his school nickname. Raithatha launched Moonpig on to the London stock market during the pandemic, one of a clutch of companies that went public in 2021, at a price of 350p with a £1.2 billion valuation, only to see its share price plummet when the lockdowns ended. It has never quite recovered.
On Thursday, the shares retreated another 22½p, or 9.2 per cent, to close at 221p.
Analysts at Peel Hunt described Raithatha's departure as 'more of an eyebrow raise than a shock. Nickyl has been an impressive figurehead and Moonpig has progressed well under his leadership'.
RBC said: 'Whilst the resignation of Raithatha will be a key talking point, we focus on the business's performance. The group has delivered a 6 per cent adjusted PBT [profit before tax] beat in 2025, with growth at the core Moonpig brand now back in double-digit growth.'
Reflecting on his tenure, Raithatha said: 'If you live and die by share price, you can become very depressed very quickly. I look back at the last seven years and we have quadrupled revenues, we have quintupled profits, the workforce is six times bigger and we have entered new countries.
'The fact that we've got 12 million customers, they're more loyal, they're more engaged. It means the strategy has worked pretty consistently over that time. The IPO was obviously a pretty big highlight which put Moonpig on the map.
'We've obviously come off the highs from a share price perspective. But the business is bigger, more profitable and faster growing than it was at the IPO. From our perspective we're delivering for customers and that should translate to delivering for shareholders.'
On Thursday morning when Nickyl Raithatha explained to Moonpig staff in a company 'all-hands meeting' that he was leaving, they were taken aback by the news. His leadership team are, by all accounts, still processing it.
Heart emojis filled the screen on the video call as staff expressed digitly that they were genuinely sorry to see him go.
After celebrating Raithatha's seven-year 'Mooniversary', as it is cloyingly called internally, with a Moonpig card, he felt it was time to explore pastures new.
Those who know him are not surprised. At just 42, the young chief is extremely ambitious and was unlikely to be celebrating Mooniversaries for the rest of his life.
His parents were among the Ugandan Indians forced to flee Idi Amin's regime in 1972. Raithatha grew up helping in his father's pharmacy. After a degree at Cambridge, he went on to cut his teeth at Goldman Sachs and then, while the financial crisis took hold, left to do an MBA at Harvard.
This planted the seed of working in business, which is where his career swerved away from the more staid world of banking, into tech and start-ups. He founded Finery, a fashion retail business, which he sold to Touker Suleyman of Dragons' Den.
Moonpig was not an obvious next step and growing the business has not been straightforward. The share price has not kept pace with the growth of the company and been a constant disappointment to investors. However, he has gained a lot of experience along the way and quite a network: his chairwoman is Kate Swann, the former boss of WH Smith.
While he has not decided what he wants to do next, it will be related to the worlds of tech and digital. 'I'm still early in my career, I've got plenty of time and capacity to take on new challenges and try new things,' he said. In this rapidly accelerating era of AI there is no shortage of tech excitement in the business world. No doubt the headhunters are already knocking.
And it'll be the end of people singing 'Mooooooonpig dot com' at him.