Whitbread
Revenue £2.61bn Dividend 82.15p
Bear this in mind the next time you queue for an overpriced cup of skinny latte. The return on capital at Whitbread’s Costa coffee chain is 46 per cent. They get back half the money spent on opening a new branch in the first year.
No surprise that Andy Harrison, the outgoing chief executive, was again playing down suggestions that the chain might be demerged. Whitbread’s latest set of targets for expansion suggest Costa will increase sales from £1.4 billion a year to £2.5 billion by 2020.
Premier Inn, the other large business within the group, will lift the number of rooms from just short of 60,000 to 85,000 by then. Much of the growth will come from the booming