Regent Inns slashes dividend
REGENT Inns, owner of the Walkabout and Jongleurs chains, today heaped further misery on the bombed-out High Street bars sector with plans to slash its dividend by a third amid tough trading.
The group avoided a profits warning but will meet analysts' forecasts only because football fans packed out its Walkabout bars during the Euro 2004 football championships.
The football, it admitted, 'masked the underlying difficult market conditions'.
Regent has been hit hard by the vicious price-cutting that has hurt all the major High Street bar operators.
Today it admitted that profit margins during the second half of its financial year were down about 1.8% because of price promotions.
Chief executive Stephen Haupt said: 'It has really been in the northern provincial towns where price discounting has been most tough.'
These areas are likely to bear the brunt of an asset write-down also flagged by the group today.
On the positive side, the 7.5% like-for-like sales decline in the first half had been reduced to 3.5% in the following months, not including the period during the football tournament. Like-for-like sales rocketed to 15.2% during Euro 2004.
