Analysis of Storage fee changes 2025
As we announced recently, from 1st January the storage fees we charge to hold maturing whisky will be increasing from £0.208 per LPA per annum to £0.218 (an increase of 4.8%). We have explained here why we feel this change is necessary given the general increases in cost of storage that the industry has seen over the past year. However, the other factor that we must consider is how greatly these changes affect investors.
Our considered opinion is that the change will not be too harmful to returns on investment, and we hope to present some analysis here to inform your own view.
A key resource we use to analyse the performance of whisky on the platform is our example accounts. These are three real accounts set up when the platform first launched in 2015, in which we made initial deposits of £10,000 and used that to purchase maturing whisky. The accounts have been treated in exactly the same way as a customer account, and they do not actively trade - therefore they represent an accurate indication of how the whiskies held within them have performed over time. You can find more information on how these accounts work here.
We have very simply gone back and historically adjusted the storage fees by 4.8% to give a side-by-side comparison of how those accounts would perform with both the current storage costs and the new increase. As you can see, while the difference is material, it does not notably change the profitability of the accounts: