Friday the 13th is perhaps as apt a day as any for a company to issue the kind of profit warningthat straight away strips out more than two thirds of the share price.

Citing a raft of issues from faster-than-expected declines in the group's DX Exchange business to an industry-wide driver shortage, the £66.3 million cap slashed its dividend from an expected 6.1p, to 2.5p. Shares in the logistics specialist tanked as a consequence, falling 68.2% to 27p on the news.

DX(GROUP) - Comparison Line Chart (Rebased)

Offering a diverse range of logistics services in areas such as pharmaceuticals, optical, legal and outsize parcels differentiates DX in a space where many peers are overly focused on the more commoditised parcels and letters segments. This more specialised approach had apparently afforded the company a greater operating margin than its more plain vanilla peers but investors will doubtless start to question the sustainability of these margins particularly in some of the group's segments where falling revenues are likely to be an expression of structural decline.

That notwithstanding, the steepness of share price declines does seem overdone even on the back of such a swingeing dividend cut.

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Issue Date: 13 Nov 2015