Imperial Tobacco Group has said that the overall financial position and operational performance of the group in the year ended September 30th has been in line with its expectations.

Tobacco net revenues are expected to be up by around four per cent with particularly good performances in its Eastern Europe, Africa & Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions.

However, stick equivalent volumes are expected to decline by up to three per cent, the majority of which is due to ongoing market weakness in Ukraine and Poland and compliance with international trade sanctions against Syria.

In a statement the firm said: "We are delivering strong gains from our key strategic brands and improving our revenue momentum through our focus on driving quality growth across our total tobacco portfolio.

"We are making excellent progress with our key strategic brands Davidoff, Gauloises Blondes, West and JPS and expect this to be reflected in further strong volume and revenue gains from these brands which continue to represent an increasing proportion of our volumes."

Analysts at Credit Suisse reacted by reiterating their "outperform" view on the company´s shares. They added the followin: "This means that Imperial should deliver 4% organic tobacco sales growth in FY12, which we see as a resilient performance considering the difficult EU industry volume backdrop this year (...) On the positive side, Imperial's strategic brands continue to enjoy strong momentum in non-EU markets, trends in Germany remain favourable and the roll-out of innovation (glidetec, Davidoff Id, crushballs) should continue supporting top line growth in coming quarters."

NR

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