Brulines sees turnover double in first half

Installing its equipment into thousands of Enterprise Inns' pubs helped boost first half turnover growth for Brulines, the manufacturer of beer flow monitoring systems.

Proforma turnover in the six months to September 30 2006 more than doubled from £4.56m to £9.24m.

Underlying trading profit rose from £900,000 to £1.85m on the back of an increase in system installations and upgrades, while pre-tax profits rose 16.3 per cent to £1.4m.

Brulines was reporting its first financial results since becoming a stock market listed company in October.

The group fitted its systems into 2,889 pubs in the first half, versus 954 in the same period in 2005, and the group also undertook 1,133 system upgrades during the period.

Gross profit margins fell from 49.9 per cent to 42.9 per cent, a decline Brulines said was in line with its projections following the recent installation programme but it anticipated these would rise as service income began to roll in.

Following its success with Punch Taverns and Enterprise Inns' pubs, the group said it was in talks with other national and regional operators and expected to increase its market penetration in the coming months.

Areas for growth included soft drinks and wine dispense monitoring, as well as footfall, and the scanning the movement of packaged products, such as bottled beers.

James Dickson, Brulines chief executive, said: "We want to become the oracle for operational data for pubs and help drive performance across the industry."

Dickson said the group hoped to extend its system penetration from the current 17,000-odd pubs to 27,000 sites within four years.

He re-iterated that his company's equipment was "robust" and said recent cases of incorrect data leading to problems for licensees were "red herrings".

"We've had 218 court appearances and a 100 per cent success rate with our systems, " he said. Data integrity was "sacrosanct", he added.

Following a management buyout in May this year it floated on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in October raising £7m.