Kingfisher to close 60 B&Q stores in Britain

LONDON, March 31 (Reuters) - Kingfisher (LSE: KGF.L - news) , Europe's biggest home improvement retailer, said on Tuesday it planned to close about 60 underperforming B&Q stores in Britain as the wider group posted a 7.5 percent fall in annual profit.

The planned store closures form part of a plan by new Chief Executive Veronique Laury to shake-up the 360-store B&Q business.

Kingfisher, which trades as B&Q and Screwfix in Britain and Castorama and Brico Depot in France, made a pretax profit of 675 million pounds ($998 million) in the year to Jan. 31.

That compares with analysts' average forecast of 674 million pounds and is down from 744 million in the 2013-14 year.

Total (Swiss: FP.SW - news) sales rose 2.9 percent on a constant currency basis to 10.97 billion pounds.

The results are the first to be presented by Laury, who succeeded Ian Cheshire in December. ($1 = 0.6766 pounds) (Reporting by James Davey; Editing by David Holmes)