JD Wetherspoon sales growth reined in by bank holiday timing and costs

● Like-for-like sales growth of 3.5% in pub group’s third trading quarter

Pubs group JD Wetherspoon has blamed the timing of the recent May bank holiday and “significant” cost increases for impacting performance in its third trading quarter.

Founder chairman Tim Martin said yesterday that JD Wetherspoon, whose 900odd outlets include about 70 in Scotland, saw same-floorspace sales lift 3.5 per cent in the 13 weeks to 29 April.

Total sales, including pub openings, closures and divestments, rose 2.8 per cent. The company said comparatives were tougher because the May Day break, included in Q3 in 2017, moved into Q4 this year.

That timing, said Wetherspoon – whose Scottish pubs include The James Watt in Greenock and The Robert Nairn in Kircaldy – was “likely to have reduced like-for-like sales by about 0.5 per cent in the period”.

Martin said there was uncertainty on how the World Cup football tournament in Russia this June might impact sales, although in recent years the chain has given its managers discretion about how much tournament football they show on pub screens.

“As anticipated, the rate of like-for-like sales growth slowed slightly in the third quarter,” he said.

“We continue to face significant cost increases in the second half in areas which include labour, business rates and the sugar tax. There is also some uncertainty as to the effect on sales of the Fifa World Cup.”

However, Wetherspoon added that it had not changed its expectations on the likely trading outcome for the full financial year.

The group, whose HQ is in Watford, said that it had opened five new pubs since the start of the financial year and closed 19.

In recent years, Martin has rowed back on a former target of about 1,200 UK pubs. Meanwhile, the chairman, a highprofile business Brexit-backer, repeated yesterday amid the EU customs union debate that he felt the UK should quit the single market.

“This will enable Parliament to eliminate taxes on non-eu food and drink imports, reducing prices in the shops, which will immediately improve living standards,” he said.

“It makes no sense for the UK to continue to impose taxes on new world wines, coffee, rice and thousands of other products, and then send the proceeds to Brussels.

“The EU masquerades as a free trade organisation, but it is really a protection racket which imposes import taxes on the 93 per cent of the world’s population that is not in the EU.”