South Staffs takes new water course

WATER companies make hundreds of millions of pounds a year from selling water to householders in their localities but South Staffordshire Water plans to go one better.

It is to market its finest produce, extracted from boreholes near Lichfield, as bottled mineral water via the nation's supermarkets.

Freshly denuded of its highly profitable growth arm - the Homeserve emergency plumbing operation was demerged as a stand-alone stock market company earlier this spring - South Staffs now has high hopes that one of its smaller surviving non-regulated businesses will add extra oomph to its dividend payment.

It has just finished building a bottling plant for its Aqua Direct venture, which will help transform supplies of Elmhurst spring water into own-label supermarket mineral water.

South Staffs today reported a 13% drop in pre-tax profits to £14.5m for the year to the end of March. The dividend is 46p against last year's 53.9p.