Crawshaw Group announces maiden dividend

BUTCHERY chain Crawshaw Group has reported a three per cent rise in annual like-for-like sales as it proposed to pay out its maiden dividend.

The Rotherham-based group said the board proposes a maiden dividend of 0.2 pence per share, with shareholder approval to be sought at its annual general meeting in June.

Sales for the year to January 31, 2013, were £18.8m, down slightly from £18.9m in the previous year, “due to the planned scale back” of Crawshaw’s less profitable sales channels, while full year like-for-like sales were up three per cent.

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Ebitda was up 15 per cent year-on-year to £700,000 while pre-tax profits were £300,000, up from zero the previous year.

Gross margin further strengthened to 43.7 per cent, from 43.3 per cent in 2012.

The group said that the increase in profits can be attributed to “the improvements in like for like sales and gross margin plus the reduction in overheads”.

Crawshaw had previously said that it believed the Government’s decision to add VAT to certain, previously exempt, cooked products from October 2012, would “seriously impact sales”.

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It said it decided to invest in additional equipment, staff and training to implement the processes required to sell certain lines “on the cool” and therefore VAT free. However, certain takeaway lines are still kept hot and have therefore now attracted VAT at 20 per cent, said the group.

The company said its hot sales have been “adversely affected, particularly initially as our staff and customers adopted the new process”, but are not down nearly as much as the recent figures from the British Poultry council suggest.

They show sales in the UK of rotisserie chickens down 18 per cent in the 23 weeks since the VAT change.

Crawshaw said: “Nonetheless it was a disruptive, expensive and challenging development that we could have done without, and our performance would have been better without the change.”

The group said that the retail climate “remains challenging”, but that it was pleased with the “continued improvements in trading over the first 12 weeks of the current year”.

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