Carluccio’s, the Italian restaurant, deli and shop, has reported adjusted ebitda up 21% to £2.6m on sales up 21% to £21.6m, for the 26 weeks to 26 March, 2006.
The AIM-listed group unveiled an average cash return on capital invested in excess of 60%.
Simon Kossoff, chief executive, said that the reason for such a high return was two fold. He told M&C Report: “It is coming from two things – we trade on average from 8am to 11pm, which gives us much longer opening times than normal restaurants and secondly we have a shop within the restaurant.”
Carluccio’s, which now has 26 locations following the opening of Chiswick, West London, last week, spends an average of £700,000 opening each restaurant.
It will open a restaurant in Richmond, Surrey, later this year bringing current year openings to five, a target laid out in last year’s IPO plan.
It has identified 100 possible locations for Carluccio’s across the UK, growing out from the its London heartland. The company said that as it expands beyond the M25, it was seeing an increasing spend per head.
Carluccio’s joins rival La Tasca in electing not to disclose like-for-like sales figures. Kossoff said: “We think this is a measure that can be manipulated very easily.
“Also we are a restaurant business that trades very well from day one. Fundamentally, this is a growth story so we believe ROCI is the right measure.”
A smoking ban across the business, introduced on 3 April, had not hit sales and the company said it had seen an “overwhelmingly positive response” from its customers.
The company now serves around 70,000 caffe customers and about 24,000 retail customers each week.
On an adjusted pre-tax basis, profits were up 21% to £2.0m.
The company listed on AIM on 14 December, 2006. Costs attributed to this process were £948,000 in the 26 weeks, on top of £236,000 last year.
The company said that since the year-end trading was in line with expectations.
