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Pre-tax profits double at Caledonian Heritable

THE company that owns the upmarket Archerfield golf resort in East Lothian, and Edinburgh pubs including The Dome and Ryan's Bar, has seen pre-tax profits more than double from £2.2 million to £5m.

ANOTHER WINNER: Carly Booth picked up honours while playing at Archerfield, and the owners of the course are also doing well. Picture: Tristan Jones
ANOTHER WINNER: Carly Booth picked up honours while playing at Archerfield, and the owners of the course are also doing well. Picture: Tristan Jones

Entrepreneur Kevin Doyle's Caledonian Heritable, which also has plant hire, haulage and property interests, saw turnover grow from £37m to £39.5m in the 12 months to October 31, 2011.

In the bar, restaurant and nightclub arm, turnover grew from £23.1m to £24.4m, property rental was flat at £2.73m, plant hire and haulage rose from £8.6m to £9.8m, golf was up from £2.1m to £2.3m and other activities fell from £338,501 to £290,137.

Accounts filed at Companies House showed the profits were boosted from a near £1.5m gain on disposal of non-core assets.

A £216,938 loss was booked on the disposal of its 33% stake in aircraft engineering business AEI Systems and a further £382,499 of investment was written off.

Mr Doyle said: "Our leisure side of the business is going very well in a tough environment.

"Archerfield is going from strength to strength, which we are pleased with, and our industrial business is going well. It is business as usual but we would like to see the economy motoring a bit more."

Since the year end a new finance facility has been agreed with Lloyds Banking Group involving a £7m revolving overdraft facility and a £26m loan. The term loan is repayable at £600,000 per quarter with a final repayment of £21.8m due in April 2014.

Mr Doyle said: "Lloyds has been first class. The support of the bank is crucial for any business."

Average staff numbers at Caledonian Heritable went up from 785 to 796, which increased overall employee costs from £13m to £13.65m. Directors' emoluments decreased from £806,453 to £681,641 with the highest paid seeing a slight decline from £211,428 to £201,163.

Archerfield has hosted the Scottish Women's Open in recent years, with winners including Catriona Matthew and Carly Booth. Mr Doyle confirmed memberships were building slowly but declined to specify what current numbers were.

He said: "You can't expect big membership growth in this environment. We have been reinvesting and putting in a lot of capital expenditure.

"If you are doing that you are attracting new business and we have had a lot of international business coming our way.

"We have put in a spa and conference centre in so it is becoming a broader offer and that has helped the business."

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