Wetherspoon prioritises sales over profits

“We’re not really focusing our major efforts on increasing profits in every year,” JD Wetherspoon (JDW) chairman Tim Martin says, before adding that this is a medium to long-term aspiration rather than a consistent short-term goal. The pub group’s like-for-like sales increased by nearly 7 per cent over its full year, but rising costs chipped away at the pub group’s adjusted profits. These included booming wage expenditure and a 25 per cent uptick in finance costs, much of which pertained to fixed-interest swaps taken out “a few years ago” when the chairman had predicted the lifting of interest rates. Statutory pre-tax profits were helped by the fact that the comparative period saw higher exceptional property losses.