Whitbread PLC, the UK’s largest hotel and restaurant group, reports its trading performance for the 50 weeks to 16th February 2012.
Sales update (% change vs. prior year)
Sales for the 11 weeks to 16th February 2012 | Sales for the 50 weeks to 16th February 2012 |
Like for like sales*¹ | Total sales | Like for like sales*¹ | Total sales | |
Premier Inn*2 | (0.9%) | 3.7% | 3.4% | 8.7% |
Restaurants | 2.2% | 4.3% | (0.1%) | 1.9% |
Hotels and Restaurants | 0.5% | 4.0% | 2.0% | 5.9% |
Costa*3 | 6.2% | 24.4% | 5.8% | 25.0% |
Total | 1.8% | 10.1% | 2.7% | 11.0% |
Andy Harrison, Chief Executive of Whitbread comments: “Whitbread has delivered good total sales growth of 11.0% for the year in difficult economic conditions, as we continue to invest in our strong brands. We expect to report in April another full year of double digit earnings growth, in line with expectations.
Following the trend we highlighted in December, industry data has continued to show a soft hotel market in the UK, with a divergence in performance between London and the regions. The market revpar in the regions has declined by around 3% in the quarter, in contrast to a more robust London market especially in the upper segments. Premier Inn has outperformed its competitive set, benefiting from our commitment to maintain our hotels to a consistent high standard.
Our scale, strong balance sheet and good returns enable us to continue to expand in line with our plans and win share of the hotel market. Our restaurant business benefitted from better trading over the Christmas period, albeit against snow impacted comparatives, and we remain focused on strengthening our brand propositions. Costa has delivered excellent results this year, with total sales increasing by 25%, driven by good like for like sales growth and record new store openings of 359 stores (306 net of closures).
This includes 71 new stores in China bringing our presence there to 163 stores. We are approaching the first anniversary of the acquisition of Coffee Nation and the launch of Costa Express. We have been very pleased by the positive customer reaction and our growth plans for this business are ahead of our original expectations.
We have around 10,000 Premier Inn rooms in our committed pipeline, which together with Costa’s growth plan means that we expect to create a further 10,000 jobs in the UK over the next 3 years, in addition to the 2,500 that we have created in 2011/12”
Trading highlights for the 50 weeks:
Hotels and Restaurants·
Premier Inn increased total room nights sold by 7.2% to 11.7 million.
Room rate was up by 1.6% which, combined with occupancy up 0.4ppts to 76.3%, increased like for like revpar by 2.2% with growth across both midweek and the weekend.
Like for like revpar grew by 7.7% in London and 1.2% in the regions.
Restaurants delivered total covers growth of 3.9%.
3,640 new rooms and 11 restaurants opened and we are on track to have opened 4,000 new rooms and 12 restaurants in the UK by year end.
Rooms continue to be refurbished on a regular cycle and over the two financial years to February 2013 we plan to have invested around £70m refurbishing some 13,000 rooms.
Costa·
Costa continued to deliver an excellent performance growing total system sales by 24.6% to £786 million within which franchise sales were up 19.3% to £320 million.
Like for like sales in UK equity stores were up 5.8% with transactions up 6.1%.
Costa has opened 359 new stores which includes 177 new stores in the UK and 182 new stores internationally.
In India and China we have a total of 95 and 163 stores respectively.
In the UK there are now 919 Costa Express units and we are proceeding with the rebranding of the remaining 253 Coffee Nation units.
Group.
The Group’s financial position remains strong following the refinancing of our facilities in November 2011 and the success of our second US private placement in September 2011.