(Reuters) -British pub group Marston’s swung to a half-year pre-tax profit on Tuesday, helped by its cost-efficiency actions and higher food and beverage sales thanks to favourable weather.
The company said underlying pre-tax profit for the six months ended March 29 came to 19 million pounds ($25.08 million), compared with a loss of 0.2 million pounds a year earlier.
After a period of weak sales due to unfavourable weather conditions and high inflation, pub groups are seeing a rise in customer spending as the weather turns warmer.
However, Britain’s hospitality sector is facing renewed costs pressures after the introduction of higher employment taxes from last month.
Marston’s expects to fully offset the financial impact by recalibrating its operations with digitisation and AI-led optimisation initiatives.
The pub group also signalled towards a “positive” summer trading period and said like-for-like sales in the five weeks since March-end were up 10.5%.
($1 = 0.7577 pounds)
(Reporting by Yamini Kalia in Bengaluru; Editing by Rashmi Aich and Mrigank Dhaniwala)
