Greene King revamp pays off

GREENE King declared today that the money it is pouring into the Old English Inns estate is beginning to pay off. While the new pubs managed to contribute a trading profit of just £1.7m on sales of £36.6m during the 33 weeks it was part of the company, things improved at the end.

Tim Bridge, chief executive of the Suffolk brewer, said that closing Old English Inns' head office and integrating the staff had caused considerable disruption to trading and that margins had started to rise only in the last weeks of the year.

He said he had now won the 'hearts and minds of the Old English Inns staff' after they had seen how much money he was prepared to lavish on their pubs.

'They are lovely old pubs and they have suffered from under-investment,' he said. 'We have already spent £5.7m on a dozen-plus, and over the next two years we'll be working systematically through the estate, bringing them up to premier sites.'

After £6.5m of exceptional costs, pre-tax profits were 5% ahead at £62.7m on a 15% increase in turnover to £494.5m for the 53 weeks ended 4 May.

Like-for-like sales at all the pubs which had less than £20,000 invested in them were up by 3.6%. A final dividend of 19.45p brings the total up to 27.3p, up 10%.