OREANDA-NEWS. On 08 August 2008 Pharmacy Chain 36.6 [RTS: APTK; MICEX: RU14APTK1007] the leading Russian health and beauty retailer announced unaudited sales and operational results according to management accounts.

Group sales

Y-o-Y in H1 2008 the Group’s consolidated sales increased by 46% and reached USUSD  563.8 million. EMC has been divested in May 2008.  The consolidated sales in H1 2008 without EMC amounted USUSD  552.4 million.

Sales by business unit

Sales in the retail unit grew by 50% and reached USUSD  449.7 million.

Sales of the production unit, Veropharm, reached USUSD  86.5 million (annual growth 49%).

Sales of other non-core businesses grew by 2.9%, including ELC sales growth of 128.6% (USUSD  2.1 million).

Retail

As of the end of Q2 2008 Pharmacy Chain 36.6 operates 1 192 stores in 29 regions of Russia.

During first 6 months of 2008, 38 pharmacies were opened organically, 71 closed, 7 rebranded and 1 reformatted.

As of the end of Q2 2008 Pharmacy Chain 36.6 operates 10 ELC stores, 14 stand-alone optical outlets with 22 additional optical departments within pharmacies.

Operational data for retail unit

During 6 months of 2008, 53 million purchases were made in Pharmacy Chain 36.6 stores, which is 14% higher than in comparable period of 2007.

Average check across the network reached USD 8.61, in Moscow USD 11.21 an increase over the comparable period of 18.6% and 9.4% respectively.

Average sales floor size at the end of Q2 is 61.2 sq meters, a decrease of 2.4% versus 2007.

Like-For-Like sales in comparable stores

As of Q2 2008 the Company will start to provide the following L-F-L sales growth calculation to ensure better transparency on the performance of mature stores.

The L-F-L reporting would be executed for a selection of comparable stores, which are:

opened or acquired 24 months from the current reporting period, and

neither rebranded nor reformatted or somehow significantly changed during last 24 months, and

not closed in the current reporting period.

As of the end of H1 2008 the company operates 406 comparable stores representing 45% of sales and 36% of traffic in the retail unit. The L-F-L sales growth in these stores in H1 2008 reached 16% as compared to H1 2007 while the traffic decreased by 5%.