Highland Spring Group, the UK’s leading producer of natural source waters, has posted its annual results for year end to 31 December 2017.
The business showed a strong performance with sales revenues exceeding £110m, an increase of over 10% from 2016.
Commenting on the annual results, Mark Steven, Group Finance Director, Highland Spring Group, said:
“One of the core strategic principles for the Group is development of the Highland Spring brand. We are proud to have regained the No.1 branded position in the UK market, being the first UK bottled water brand to exceed annual sales of 300m litres.
Highland Spring’s share of the UK Bottled Water market is 17.5%.
We continue to have confidence in the UK bottled water market, which has grown for the ninth consecutive year with annual growth of 8.1% in 2017.
Our operating profit for 2017 was £4.2m, a year on year reduction of 24.7% mainly due to significant increases in raw material costs which were absorbed by the business, particularly on PET.
Based on our market insight and the continued demand for healthy products, we are confident that there continues to be a strong market for natural source waters.
We will look to mitigate the short-term impact of cost increases through improved production efficiencies and re-engineering our product range to encourage light weighting of materials.
“We invested in excess of £20m in increasing bottling capacity in 2016 and 2017 to meet current and anticipated market demand which enabled the installation of two new production lines at our Blackford facility.
This includes the fastest, most technologically advanced PET bottled drinks line in the UK and we were honoured to have the new facility officially opened by HM The Queen in July 2017.
The Group remains focused on meeting the needs of a truly circular plastics economy and we are committed to doing business in an environmentally sustainable way.
In 2018, the Group trialled the Highland Spring eco bottle, made from 100% recycled PET, and supported an ambitious new report from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, which sets out a roadmap to eliminate plastic packaging waste in the drinks sector by 2030.”
About Highland Spring Group
Highland Spring Group is the UK’s leading supplier of natural source water. Now bottling over 600 million litres of water a year, the Highland Spring Group produces brands including Highland Spring, Speyside Glenlivet, Hydr8 and a range of private label flavoured and unflavoured waters for some of the UK’s major supermarkets and food service retailers.
For further information on Highland Spring Group please visit:
www.highlandspringgroup.com and www.highlandspring.com