Fri 11th Oct 2013 - Breaking News - Caffe Nero pushes up revenue almost 11% Caffe Nero pushes up revenue almost 11%: Boosting store numbers by a net 7.5% and pushing up like-for-like sales by 2.8% helped Caffe Nero increase revenue by 10.7% to £204.3m for the financial year to the end of May, the company announced today. Gross profit for the year was up on 2012 by 10.8% to £49.2m, with store margins flat at 24.1%, pushing Ebitda up 10.8% on the previous year to £34.9m, with Ebitda margin again unchanged at 17.1%. Operating profit rose 10.5% to £21.1m, though the operating profit margin slipped slightly to 10.3% from 10.4% in the year to the end of May 2012 as admin costs rose 10.8% and the cost of sales rose 10.7%. Profit before tax rose 10.5% to £21.1m. The company opened 45 new stores during the year and closed six, giving it 519 stores in 247 UK towns and cities. Caffe Nero said it intended opening another 45 new stores this coming year, and it saw potential in the UK market for at least 750 Caffe Nero stores. It said among its key performance indicators, Ebitda, which controls its ability to fund future store openings without recourse to external finance, continued to grow despite a challenging economic environment, thanks to the continued expansion in the number of its stores, the growing maturity of younger existing stores, which meant increasing store profit in absolute terms, and “careful cost management”. The increase in like-for-like sales was almost exactly in the middle of the company’s target range of 2 to 4% a year.