Dow Jones Newswires: Tesco says annual profit halved, will buy back £750 million in shares

Tesco PLC on Thursday said its pretax profit halved in fiscal 2023 and that it would buy back 750 million pounds ($936.4 million) of shares over the next 12 months

The British grocer
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posted a pretax profit of GBP1.00 billion for the year ended Feb. 25 compared with GBP2.03 billion a year earlier.

Revenue including fuel rose to GBP65.76 billion from GBP61.34 billion. A company-compiled consensus had expected GBP65.72 billion.

Group sales, which excludes fuel, came in at GBP57.66 billion, up from GBP54.77 billion. For retail, sales on a like-for-like basis rose 5.1% as volumes held up despite cost-of-living pressures, the FTSE 100 group said.

Group adjusted operating profit–Tesco’s preferred metric, which strips out exceptional and other one-off items–was GBP2.63 billion, ahead of the GBP2.61 billion expected by consensus and below the previous year’s GBP2.83 billion.

The board declared a final dividend of 7.05 pence a share, bringing the total payout for the year to 10.90 pence, in line with the previous year.

“We expect to be able to deliver a broadly flat level of retail adjusted operating profit in 2023-24 and retail free cash flow within our target range of GBP1.4 billion to GBP1.8 billion. We expect Bank adjusted operating profit of between GBP130 million and GBP160 million,” said Chief Executive Ken Murphy.

Write to Elena Vardon at elena.vardon@wsj.com

This post was originally published on Market Watch

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