Britvic makes light of revenue decline
On a reported basis, however, Britvic Ireland’s revenues for the period, which represents the company’s first quarter, fell 5.8%. This, though, was due to a change in reporting mechanisms for the Irish unit, which shortened the number of trading days measured by eight days.
Britvic Ireland’s changed accounting periods are a direct result of its recent integration with its UK operations.
Regarding its Irish operations, Britvic said underlying performance has continued to improve, with both revenue and take-home market share growing, despite trading conditions remaining difficult.
Britvic also reported respective annualised rises of 4.7%, 1.5%, and 5.6% in its French, British, and international divisions, with first-quarter group revenue up 1.3% at £311.8m.
“We delivered a robust first-quarter performance in each of our core markets, despite a challenging consumer environment,” said group chief executive, Simon Litherland. “We continued to make good progress implementing our new strategy and remain on track to deliver cost reduction initiatives as planned this year.”
He added that trading performance in the first few weeks of the second quarter is ahead of the same period last year, “and we remain confident that earnings before interest and tax this year will be within the range of £148m to £156m, which we communicated at our preliminary results in November”.
