JOHN Menzies has revealed it continues to trade ahead of last year, flagging a positive performance in aviation services, and is hopeful efforts to sell its distribution business, while taking longer than expected, will reach a “satisfactory conclusion”.

The Edinburgh company’s chairman, Dermot Smurfit, declared Menzies’ aviation services business continued to go from “strength to strength”.

Updating the stock market on trading for the first four months of 2018, John Menzies said: “The positive start to the year highlighted in March has continued and the group continues to trade ahead of last year.”

It added: “Overall, at Menzies Aviation, trading across the division has generally been positive with strong cargo volumes continuing to prevail, ground-handling and fuelling volume in line with expectations and continuing positive contract momentum.”

The group told the stock market Menzies Distribution was “trading positively”.

It said that, within the print media category, its sales decline against the same period last year was 5%, with newspaper volume in line with expectations and magazines trading better than forecast.

John Menzies announced, when it published 2017 results in March, that a sale process for the distribution division was under way.

Updating the market on this yesterday, it said: “This process is taking longer than we anticipated but we remain fully engaged with a number of potential buyers. We remain hopeful that we will be able to reach a satisfactory conclusion and will update shareholders at the appropriate time.”

Mr Smurfit said: “We remain committed to our group separation plans, and I remain hopeful that we can reach a satisfactory conclusion.”

Flagging a positive outlook for the aviation services business, and highlighting expansion ambitions, he added: “I am pleased that our aviation business continues to go from strength to strength. We are operating in a structural growth market. We are extremely well placed to extend our geographical presence and overall market share as we grow organically, enter new markets and deepen our product offering.”

John Menzies said, excluding the impact of previously flagged weaker foreign currency, it

continued to be on track and the “board is confident of achieving its full-year projections”.

It noted it had added a number of “into-plane”

fuelling contracts in North America, citing use of new technologies to boost productivity. John Menzies said its operations in North America continued to be “impacted by market-wide labour issues which are holding back returns in this region”, and it was working with airlines and airport authorities to tackle these.

The group added: “We continue to review and prioritise a number of new business opportunities and we believe that, with our broad service offering and geographical spread, we are well placed to take advantage of the exciting opportunities that exist within our growing marketplace.”