23rd May 2019 08:26
LONDON (Alliance News) - Mitchells & Butlers PLC on Thursday said it outperformed the market in the first half of its financial year, delivering both revenue and profit growth.
Mitchells & Butlers shares were trading 6.6% higher at 258.50 pence each early Thursday morning, among the top performers of the FTSE 250 index.
For the six months ended April 13, the managed restaurants & pubs operator posted pretax profit of GBP75 million, up 8.7% from GBP69 million a year prior.
Revenue rose 5% year-on-year to GBP1.18 billion from GBP1.13 billion, with like-for-like sales up 4.1% in the first half.
"This is a strong set of results, demonstrating that we continue to build momentum in the business, delivering sales growth, sustained market outperformance and a return to operating profit growth all while reducing leverage to below four times," Chief Executive Officer Phil Urban.
He added: "Success in this highly competitive market is dependent on a continuous stream of improvements, and that is what we are delivering with many small advances at site level driving significant benefits in aggregate. We will maintain our focus on these initiatives which we believe are transforming the business."
Looking ahead, the company reported like-for-like sales in the past 33 weeks were up 3.8%.
Mitchells & Butlers said: "Looking forward, whilst we expect the market we operate in to remain tough and with limited visibility, we are confident in our ability to continue to out-perform based on the many initiatives that we are now seeing make a real difference to both the competitiveness and efficiency of our business."
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