WHEN Glasgow retailer Quiz Clothing listed on the Alterative Investment Market in 2017 its shares were priced at close to £2; they are now trading much closer to17p.

The pain started to set in for the firm in October 2018, when its shares fell by 25 per cent in one day after the business issued a profit warning on the back of stagnant sales on third-party websites.

By the start of 2019 its shares had fallen to 24p on the back of another profit warning and, with the bad news continuing throughout the year, never recovered.

In December the firm reported that it had turned a first-half pre-tax profit of £3.8 million into a loss of £6.8m, with chief executive Tarak Ramzan noting its large store estate was to blame.

“Much of the UK retail sector has remained under pressure during the period impacted by macro-economic uncertainty as well as the accelerating structural shift to online retailing,” he said, noting that the business had “taken actions to address the performance of our UK stores and concessions through renegotiating rents where possible and exiting a number of loss-making concessions”.

Mr Ramzan, who admitted that “a number” of stores would continue to lose money until leases could be negotiated, was not the only chief executive who faced a tough time in 2019.

At Clydesdale Bank-owner CYBG, which rebranded as Virgin Money in October, chief executive David Duffy continued to be dogged by his organisation’s historic involvement in the selling of payment protection insurance (PPI), with £430m being wiped off the business’s value when it said in September that it had hiked its provisions for “legacy PPI costs”.

It came after the business started the year saying it was comfortable that it has set aside enough cash to deal with the continuing influx of PPI claims, despite being on the receiving end of 1,800 new complaints every week in the three months to the end of December.

In its September announcement, the banking group said it was hiking its provision for legacy PPI costs to £450m after receiving an “unprecedented volume” of information requests prior to the Government’s cut-off date of August 29. More than eight months’ worth of requests were received in a single month, with 340,000 requests in aggregate coming in over a five-week spell, and around 120,000 arriving in the final three days before the deadline.

In November, Mr Duffy said that Virgin Money “like the rest of the industry, [was] surprised by the scale of the PPI information requests and complaints during August”.

It was also a tough year for Weir Group’s chief executive John Stanton, who in February announced the £275m sale of the company’s loss-making Flow Control division, only to report in May that the firm had suffered a 23% fall in oil and gas orders in the first quarter of the year.

That announcement wiped £170m off the company’s value then in November it warned on profits in its oil and gas division and revealed that a fifth of its US workforce has been axed as a result of tough trading in America.

“In North American oil and gas markets, demand was impacted by an intensified focus on cash preservation in the quarter,” Mr Stanton said.

“In response, we have undertaken a circa £30 million cost reduction programme in this division to support competitiveness in the short term.”

Elsewhere, the boss of Aberdeen-based engineering giant Wood Group, who in May faced a shareholder revolt over executive pay, had a better year overall.

The firm, which was founded by oil industry veteran Sir John Wood in 1982, had been hit hard by the downturn in the oil and gas sector, but in August its chief executive Robin Watson said it was starting to feel the impact of the recovery.

“I’m a big believer in being positive about the North Sea," he said. "It still sustains 350,000 jobs in the UK, it’s a big part of the primary energy mix, it’s a key industry as far as we are concerned and we’re very glad to be one of the largest employers in it.”

In October the company’s shares surged by 7% after it provided reassurance that it was on course to achieve strong growth, with its underlying earnings remaining “broadly in line with consensus, despite the impact on activity of a slowing macro environment”.

Brothers Douglas and Iain Anderson also had reason to celebrate this year after the firm they inherited from their father Gordon in 1988 posted its best-ever set of financial results.

GAP Group, which specialises in tool and equipment hire, revealed that in the year to the end of March its turnover breached the £200m barrier for the first time while its pre-tax profits rose to an all-time high of £18.7m.

When announcing the results Douglas Anderson noted that it had been “a big year with quite a few milestones and records”.

Similarly, whisky distiller Edrington was celebrating this year after growing revenues by 9% to £679.8m and profits by 4%, to £91.6m.

Its chief executive Scott McCroskie, who took over from Ian Curle at the beginning of the 2018/19 financial year, said the company had been the beneficiary of growing demand in overseas markets.

“The business has delivered strong international growth that reflects continuing consumer demand for our products, particularly in China, South East Asia and the USA, which is the world’s largest market for premium spirits,” he said.

Edrington, which was founded by William Robertson and John Baxter in 1861, employs 850 people in Scotland out of a global headcount of 3,200.