Churchill China benfits from hospitality

Ceramic tableware maker Churchill China made "solid" progress in the four months to the end of April as hospitality revenues offset weakness in the retail business."Overall trading performance in the four months to the end of April 2010 has continued to show solid progress against the comparative period last year," chairman Jonathan Sparey will tell shareholders at today's AGM.The steadily improving trend in hospitality revenues since last September was maintained into April, with a new approach to Churchill's core market generating "encouraging" levels of additional sales in the UK. Last year's strong sales performance in lower margin volume channels at the retail division has not been repeated in 2010, causing a drop in consolidated revenues there."However, we continue to make progress against our target of improving the quality of our earnings through increasing sales to middle market customers in the UK and abroad," Sparey said. "Our major goal for 2010 is to improve our profitability, despite the backdrop of continued economic and market uncertainty, by focusing our resources and effort on the sectors of our business which generate the highest returns. I am pleased that in the period to date we are making good progress against this objective."