LONDON -- The Restaurant Group (LSE: RTN.L) -- whose principal brands are Frankie & Benny's, Chiquito and Garfunkel's -- opened 2% up this morning, on the release of its interim results for the first half of 2012, but has since fallen back to just over 1% up on yesterday's close.
Total revenue is up a record 7.5%, to 252 million pounds, operating profit has risen 8% to 27.3 million pounds, pre-tax profit is up 7% to 26.1 million pounds, with a 10.3% increase in earnings per share. Eight new sites were opened in the first six months of 2012, a further five so far this half, with a total of 25-30 new sites targeted for 2012 overall.
Andrew Page, chief executive of The Restaurant Group, commented:
Trading continues to be good with the year to date like-for-like sales 3.25% ahead of last year. We have a fantastic team at TRG which has worked very hard to deliver this performance and they will all be looking to build further on this during the second half.
The Restaurant Group is now up over 11% on the year-to-date, and 14% on this time last year, rewarding recent investors, but is still down almost 14% on its pre-credit-crunch high of 2007, which must be a disappointment for longer-term shareholders. But at least things are now moving in the right direction.
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