Friday preview: Mitchells and Butlers faces tough comparatives

Struggling pubs group Mitchells and Butlers, in common with its peers, has been wrestling with rising costs and a challenging consumer environment, but unlike its peers has been doing so without the leadership of a Chief Executive Officer.

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Struggling pubs group Mitchells and Butlers, in common with its peers, has been wrestling with rising costs and a challenging consumer environment, but unlike its peers has been doing so without the leadership of a Chief Executive Officer.

"We expect the current trading update to be lacklustre given recent weather and tough comparatives," Panmure Gordon said.

Like-for-like (LFL) sales in the nine weeks to January 21st, 2012, were up 6.5% on the corresponding period a year earlier, pushing the LFL sales improvement in the first 17 weeks of the group's financial year up to 4.4%. "However, the group cautioned that underlying LFL sales in January were closer to circa 1%," notes Panmure Gordon, " although we believe that partly reflects difficult comps [comparative figures]."

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The broker reckons it will be another year before the group can contemplate resuming dividend payments. It is forecasting flat earnings of £63m profit before tax and earnings per share of 11.3p.

INTERIMS

Mitchells & Butlers

INTERIM DIVIDEND PAYMENT DATE

James Halstead

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ANNOUNCEMENTS

Producer Price Index(GER) (07:00)

GMS

Wildhorse Energy Ltd. (DI)

FINALS

Blinkx, JZ Capital Partners Ltd

IMSS

Chesnara, Keller Group, Kentz Corporation Ltd.

SPECIAL DIVIDEND PAYMENT DATE

Millennium & Copthorne Hotels

AGMS

Chesnara, Computacenter, Fresnillo, Huntsworth, JSC Kazkommertsbank GDR (Reg S), Keller Group, Kentz Corporation Ltd., Menzies(John), Michael Page International, Total Produce

FINAL DIVIDEND PAYMENT DATE

Arbuthnot Banking Group, ARM Holdings, Clarke (T.), Downing Planned Exit VCT 2011 (General Shares), Downing Planned Exit VCT 2011 (Low Carbon Shares), Downing Planned Exit VCT 2011 (Structured Shares), Goldenport Holdings Inc., Johnson Service Group, MCB Finance Group, Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, Morgan Sindall Group, National Express Group, Norish Units, office2office, Petrofac Ltd., Powerflute Oyj (DI), ReThink Group, Secure Trust Bank, Spirax-Sarco Engineering

JH

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