Asos warehouse fire in South Yorkshire leads company to halt sales

Online fashion retailer Asos has been forced to suspend its website and stop taking orders, possibly for several days, after a fire at the firm's main warehouse in Barnsley.

The fire, which South Yorkshire police believe was started deliberately on Friday night, ripped through several floors of Asos's vast distribution centre. It took 10 fire engines and more than 60 firefighters to bring the blaze under control.

Around 500 workers were evacuated from the premises. The company now faces a battle to get its operations moving and it is unclear when orders already placed will be delivered.

On Sunday shoppers trying to order clothing were greeted by a brief message from the firm saying: "We have pressed pause on the Asos website this is due to a fire in our Barnsley distribution centre in the early hours of Saturday morning."

It added: "We expect to be back to normal for you in the next day or so."

The Barnsley warehouse is critical to Asos – every product it sells is checked there before being shipped by air, land or sea to be delivered. Last year the group had sales of £770m.

A spokesman was unable to say when the Asos site might resume taking orders. "Asos are still evaluating the situation," he said. "They are striving to get the website up and running as soon as they can."

Asos is listed on the London Stock Exchange. Given the scale of the disruption, the company is likely to make a statement to shareholders before trading resumes on Monday morning.

Loyal Asos customers were quick to offer sympathy on social media networks, creating hashtags such as #poorasos and #asosfire. But others were left fretting that their orders had been lost. Several Twitter users lamented that their clothes would not arrive in time for the Glastonbury festival.

The company is no stranger to drama – in December 2005 its previous warehouse, in Hemel Hempstead, was damaged when explosions ripped through the Buncefield fuel depot.

After that incident – which founder and chief executive Nick Robertson said was the worst fate an online retailer could suffer – the company was forced to suspend its shares, and refund about 19,000 orders. But it fought back rapidly, reopening in mid-January and doubling its profits in the next financial year.

Retail analyst Nick Bubb pointed out that Asos now has many more competitors than in 2005, with customer expectations on order delivery much higher than nine years ago.

"The best case scenario is that the business is quickly back in action, via temporary facilities nearby, and that the insurance companies settle up to cover the direct costs of the disruption," said Bubb.

"The worst case scenario is that customer confidence is affected for a longer period of time and that the suspicion of arson delays the insurance companies' response."

Asos has come under pressure recently as traditional retailers get to grips with online shopping; Marks and Spencer, for example, has recently launched a new website in an attempt to profit from the boom in e-commerce.

Less than three weeks ago, Asos issued a shock warning to investors that its profits would be less than expected. The warning wiped almost a third off the company's stockmarket value. It blamed a slowdown in sales growth, and increased competition which was forcing down profit margins.

That left analysts speculating whether the company had tried to expand too fast, in the face of tougher competition from bricks-and-morter operations.

Robertson founded Asos – the business was originally called As Seen on Screen – in 2000 and built a reputation for making the latest fashions available to customers quickly, at affordable prices.

Its shares surged from 30p a decade ago to more than £70 four months ago. But they have more than halved since then, to £27.52 on Friday evening, hours before the fire broke out in Barnsley.