Revenue and profit fell at Churchill China in a ‘challenging’ financial year, but its business performance has been described as ‘resilient’ given the headwinds faced.
According to the pottery giant’s latest financial results, revenue dropped 4.9 per cent from £82.3 million in 2023 to £78.3 million for the year ended 31 December 2024
Pre-tax profit fell from £10.8 million to £8.5 million, representing a return on sales of 10.9 per cent (from 13.1 per cent in 2023) in the same period.
The Stoke-on-Trent-based company, which primarily supplies to the hospitality sector, continued to battle ongoing pressures in the global hospitality sector and has said reduced sales volumes contributed to the decline.
However, the firm believes it has continued to grow market share in the UK and is addressing factors within its control.
Chief Executive David O’Connor said: “2024 was a challenging year with market contraction driving lower sales. We continue to address those activities that are within our control.
“We have accelerated our continuous improvement programme across the factory. Correspondingly, yields have improved and we see further opportunities for significant savings through this programme.
“In addition we are driving our capital expenditure to focus on innovation and cost reduction through automation and process control.
“We continue to win new installations and projects across all our markets and see strong replacement orders from our installed customer base, which highlights the resilience of our business in this current market downturn.
“We expect to see financial returns from our improvement activities over the coming years as the underlying macro conditions and consumer sentiment improves.”
In a chairman’s statement, Robin Williams said: “These results demonstrate the strength of our brand as we continued to experience steady demand in weak markets both in the UK and export. We continued to deliver new product into the market with those introduced in the last two years delivering £7m of sales. Our performance in our core markets was strong with the UK showing good resilience and we performed comparatively well in northern Europe.
“2024 was however, a challenging year for the company. Waning consumer confidence and political uncertainty dominated both at home and in our major overseas markets, meaning that even our strong performance was against a backdrop of decline. Furthermore, the October UK Budget created further financial challenges for our UK hospitality customer base and added considerably to our costs of employment.”
He adds: “Overall, business performance has been resilient given the headwinds faced, and we continue to look forward to an improving economic situation for which we are well positioned.”
