The Queen’s Jubilee will be a boon to pubs, and so will the Euro 2012 football tournament. But what the Olympics will do for the nation’s boozers is less clear.
So says Enterprise Inns boss Ted Tuppen. “We have less visibility, less history to judge what will happen with the games,” he said.
Enterprise’s plan is to have a marketing push that links Britain’s athletes to their nearest pub — in the hope that drinkers will get behind the athlete from their home town.
“We all suddenly became interested in curling when those Scottish girls were doing well a few years ago,” Tuppen recalled.
He was talking as Enterprise unveiled profit for the half year of £64 million, a fall of £10 million.
The highly indebted group is in no position to pay a dividend to shareholders who have seen the shares crash from around 800p a few years ago to 69p today.
Those debts are down by £200 million to £2.9 billion.
Tuppen said pubs had been subjected to four years of “cost pressures, consumer weakness and political interference”, making life difficult for Enterprise and its publicans.
“Everyone has got more used to operating in these conditions,” he said, and the pubs that had survived were in decent shape.
Enterprise, a so-called tied operator that leases pubs to private landlords, charging them rent and selling them beer, says its estate of 6000 pubs has much improved, although like-for-like net income was down 1.6%.
Enterprise has begun talks about extending its bank facilities past 2013.
