Marston’s chief executive Ralph Findlay has told MCA that he foresees no slowdown in the pipeline of new sites, with a further 15 pubs and five to 10 lodges planned for FY19.
Findlay was speaking after the announcement of the pub operator and brewer’s trading update for the 16 weeks to 20 January, which showed like-for-like sales in the Destination & Premium hit by a fortnight of snow in December.
“The underlying performance in that business is actually in line with where it had been if you just strip out those two snowy weeks, so I am pretty happy with that,” he said. “The reason it didn’t have such a big impact on the Taverns estate is because more of those are more wet-led community pubs that people can walk to, so we do tend to see less of an impact.”
Findlay stressed that the group had also stuck to its policy of not being drawn into heavy discounting, saying: “That may have had some relative impact on our like-for-like sales performance but I am confident that our margins and our profits are better as a result of it.”
He said that looking at the rest of 2018, the business still had the benefit of the 19 pubs opened last year to come through. “We will also have the full year benefit of the Charles Wells acquisition,” he said, which has helped strengthen its drinks range.
“If I look forward to 2019 we have a very good pipeline of new site development, both in pub restaurants and in lodges,” he said. “Next year I would say that we would continue to open at a rate of about 15 pub restaurants and bars a year, and between five to 10 lodges over the same time, which will provide a good avenue of growth for us.”
“I think there is also more that we can drive from the acquisition of Charles Wells, and other brewing opportunities,” he added.
Performance in its Taverns business benefited from an improved drinks range, which Findlay said had been influenced by growth in interest in craft drinks, whether beer or spirits, with craft gin gaining increasing interest in the past year or so. He added that its keg beer Shipyard had seen a very strong performance within its pub estate.
The addition of the Charles Wells Brewing business in May of last year brought with it “not only some good additional brands, like Bombardier and Courage, but also some very strong licensed brands, in particular Estrella Damm, so we have a really good line up of traditional British beers, world lagers and US craft beer”, he said.
Findlay said he was pleased with the performance of pilot operating formats, Firebrand and Accent, adding: “It is in the early stages of evaluation, but we will continue to work on those and I’d expect to be able to report further when we publish our interims in May.”
On the currently 22-strong Generous George brand, he said: “I think that as a brand it is well established within our business, and we will continue to review whether there are more of those to come.”
