27th Apr 2016 09:10
LONDON (Alliance News) - Crawshaw Group PLC on Wednesday said it swung to a loss in its recently-ended financial year due to investments it made as part of its expansion plans, but revenue rose and it said its new stores are trading profitably.
The fresh meat and food-to-go retailer said it made a pretax loss of GBP0.3 million in the year ended January 31, having made a pretax profit of GBP1.2 million the year before.
In order to achieve its accelerated store opening programme of at least 15 stores a year, Crawshaw has built an internal resource to allow it to find the retail sites, recruit and train the new staff, and manage the pre-opening tasks and marketing. This cost the group GBP1.6 million in the year, leading to the loss.
Crawshaw expects the new food shops to trade profitably from day one and, when mature, produce over GBP1 million sales per year on average per shop and an annual earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation contribution of GBP140,000 apiece.
Total revenue grew by more than half to GBP37.1 million in the recent year from GBP24.6 million the year before, boosted by contributions from both like-for-like stores and the 17 new stores opened during the period. Like-for-like sales rose by 1.8%.
Crawshaw will pay a final dividend of 0.47 pence, which is flat year-on-year, taking the total dividend to 0.57p, also flat year-on-year.
Crawshaw added that total group sales for the first seven weeks of the new year increased by 64%, with the newly-opened stores trading well and profitably.
"The foundations for our accelerated growth are in place and the rollout is very much underway. We now have a strong resource that will enable us to deliver another year of rapid expansion and profitable growth. We are therefore very confident and excited about the future," Chairman Richard Rose said in a statement.
Shares in Crawshaw were trading up 4.4% at 83.00 pence on Wednesday morning.
By Karolina Kaminska; [email protected] @KarolinaAllNews
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