BOOTS PURE DRUG EARNINGS
Lord Trent's review at the Boots Pure Drug meeting leaves no room for doubt that this progressive business, despite keen competition, is still growing. Last year total trade, number of prescriptions dispensed and number of customers all reached new records. There were over 169,000,000 sales —3+ millions a week—and the group dispensed a weekly average of 150,000 prescriptions. That the net earnings were rather lower than in 1936 was due partly to increased expenses, wages, rents, fuel, raw materials, &c., all having risen, and partly to higher taxation. In its jubilee year the company would doubtless have liked to fulfil the hopes cherished in some quarters of a special scrip bonus but Lord Trent's defence of the board's conservative policy will be generally approved.
Times were too uncertain, in his view, to justify a departure from the toard's policy of accumulating and conserving resources and shareholders have reason to know that money ploughed back into this business bears good fruit. One example of the enterprising policy which has characterised this company's progress is the erection, now almost com- pleted, of a large factory for the manufacture of dry goods at Beeston. As to the outlook, Lord Trent is not among the easy optimists who refuse to face the fact of recession. The company's sales, he states quite frankly, must be inti- mately bound up with the purchasing power of the public
(Continued on page i170.)
FINANCIAL NOTES (Continued from pOge 116X.)
and prevailing economic conditions are not so favourable as in 1937. Shareholders will draw confidence, however, from his reminder that the company is so strongly entrenched in the trade and so well buttressed by large cash resources that it is well placed to face successfully any rough weather.
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