Wolves returns £100m to shareholders

Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries is on course to fulfil the promises it made to shareholders earlier this year.

As part of the defence against a takeover by a Pubmaster-led consortium, it said it would return £200m to shareholders, in two stages.

Today it announced the first leg of £100m would be returned, through a share buy-back scheme. The other £100m will be returned in April 2003.

The company does not need to make any more disposals to meet the targets - the rest of the money will be generated through cash-flow.

The company also revealed a strong set of full-year results and seems to have restored confidence in the City. Wolves full-year results revealed pre-tax profits up 17.1 per cent to £76.1m on sales of £565.4m.

The shares rose on the back of the news to 515p before coming to rest at 505p. The price Pubmaster offered for Wolves was 513p, which would have valued the company at £485m.

This was first time that Wolves has not been involved in a takeover bid when reporting financial results, since 1997. Chief executive Ralph Findlay said there was still much to be done in the existing business but did not rule out future acquisitions.

"We know that scale works in this business," he said. "There is a lot to be done but there will soon come a time when we will be interested in acquisitions - single units or perhaps packages of pubs."

Part of the Wolves defence was also to re-focus the company in its core business. It will exit contract lager-brewing, it has sold the Cameron brewery and closed Mansfield, and has transferred some 206 pubs from managed to tenanted. Mr Findlay said the company had concentrated on 'chopping the tail' of its pub estate. Average sales in the W&DB managed estate had risen to £8,800 from £5,000 in 1995.

The company had also reduced debt by more than to £200m to £450m.

It plans to spend £80m over five years on developing its Bostin' Local pubs. The term Bostin' is a Black Country expression for really good or great.