(new: share price, experts and more details)

FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX) - Disappointing quarterly figures and a gloomy outlook for the year from Hugo Boss pushed the fashion group's shares to their lowest level in more than three years on Tuesday. In the late morning, the shares were the weakest MDax stock, trading 8.5 percent lower at 36.95 euros. This results in an annual loss of around 45 percent. A year ago, the shares were worth twice as much.

The shares of sports fashion manufacturers Adidas and Puma lost 2.3 and 3.5 percent respectively in the downward pull of the Boss share.

After a disappointing second quarter, Hugo Boss is taking a more pessimistic view of the year as a whole. The Swabian company had to cut back on both sales and earnings due to a poor buying mood among customers and a weak performance in Asia, particularly in the important sales market of China. With its new targets, the Group fell well short of experts' estimates.

The German fashion group thus joins the series of negative news from other companies in the premium consumer sector. Just the day before, Swiss watch manufacturer Swatch and British clothing manufacturer Burberry had disappointed investors with weak figures or outlooks and recorded double-digit percentage falls in their share prices.

The experts at investment bank Oddo BHF downgraded the Hugo Boss share to "Neutral" following the forecast cut. Other analysts lowered their price targets. Although Boss continues to perform above average, it is not immune to the adverse environment, commented Zuzanna Pusz from UBS.

Chiara Battistini from JPMorgan expressed a similar view, seeing Boss as "another member of the choir" in the fragile consumer sector after the disappointments of Swatch and Burberry. She also attributed the low operating result to investments in advertising and retail. She had expected the annual targets to fall, but not to this extent. The consumer business remains volatile and fragile worldwide.

For Jefferies expert Frederick Wild, the decisive factor is whether the new outlook already sufficiently reflects the risk this year. His colleague Michael Kuhn from Deutsche Bank assumes that Metzinger will probably not achieve earnings growth in the current year. In terms of operating profit (EBIT), Hugo Boss believes that a decline of up to 15 percent compared to the previous year is possible. At best, it will increase by five percent./edh/tih/jha/