Cosmetics and nutrition website owner THG (THG) is building on its strong start to life on the stock market.

On 12 January the company better known as The Hut Group, unveiled the latest in a series of earnings upgrades since its September 2020 market flotation – suggesting the firm was well advised on the merits of under-promising and over-delivering before going public.

The latest upgrade is underpinned by strong trading over the Black Friday sales event with the company acquiring 1.7 million new active customers in November alone.

As well as this organic progress the company also announced some significant M&A activity in December, snapping up US skin care and beauty e-commerce site Dermstore for $350 million and investing £59.5 million in two of its UK-based nutrition product suppliers – Claremont Ingredients and David Berryman.

Liberum Capital analyst Wayne Brown says he has upgraded his EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) forecasts 12% since the company joined the stock market last year.

At the time of writing the shares trade at 806.2p, up 60% on the 500p IPO price. A lot of the excitement around the business relates to Ingenuity, a technology platform which has been sold as a solution to third parties much in the same way that Ocado’s (OCDO) online groceries platform is sold to global supermarkets. [TS]

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