Marston's, the brewing and pub group now expanding into Scotland, kept the City happy yesterday with growth in earnings and dividends, despite a wet summer and the squeeze on pubs.
The group, whose shares are up by one-third in 12 months, posted a 9% rise in underlying pre-tax profit on a 5.5% sales rise to £72 million, while core earnings per share rose by nearly 10%, prompting a 5% rise in the final and total dividend.
The pub division of Marston's headed by Pete Dalzell, interviewed by The Herald last weekend, has plans for up to 10 new pub-restaurants north of the Border, creating 500 full-time and part-time jobs over the next three years in a £25m investment. The first site at Dunbar is under way, with others at Braehead in Glasgow and Shawfair near Edinburgh well advanced.
Dunfermline and Forfar are targeted for early next year, with permissions pending on four more pubs.
"Our results demonstrate good progress in implementing our strategy, despite the challenging consumer environment and exceptionally wet weather over the summer months," the group said.
"We have seen an encouraging start to the new financial year. In managed pubs, like-for-like sales in the eight weeks to 24 November rose 2%, with food sales growth of 3.4%, and wet sales improving by 0.9%. In our tenanted and franchise pubs, profit trends continue to improve steadily and are estimated to be up around 3%. Our beer brands are performing in line with expectations."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article