Compass Group sees revenue growth picking up next year

(Adds CEO quotes, details, analyst comments)

By Li-mei Hoang

LONDON, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Britain's Compass Group (Other OTC: CMPGF - news) , the world's biggest catering firm, said it expected revenue growth to accelerate next year as its businesses in Europe and Japan recovered.

In comments likely to reassure investors, Chief Executive Richard Cousins ruled himself out of the running to take over as chairman of troubled supermarket group Tesco (Xetra: 852647 - news) . Cousins joined the Tesco board as a non-executive director this month.

Cousins forecast the pickup in revenues after the company reported underlying pretax profits rose 5.4 percent to 1.2 billion pounds ($1.9 billion) for the year ended Sept. 30, helped by strong demand in North America and emerging markets.

"I would expect our topline will accelerate a little bit, so we did 4.1 percent in 2014, we would expect to do a little bit better than that in 2015," Cousins told Reuters."

"I think we feel really good about the state of play," he added.

Cousins expected Europe and Japan to return to growth next year after implementing a restructuring programme two years ago.

"We've had 2 or 3 years of revenue contraction in Europe and the fact that we see in 2015 to be returning to growth, I think is of huge significance," he said.

The company, whose clients range from schools and hospitals to tennis players at Wimbledon, raised its full-year dividend by 10.5 percent to 26.5 pence, on top of returning 1 billion pounds of cash to its shareholders.

Shares (Frankfurt: DI6.F - news) in the company dipped 2p to 1072 pence by 1045 GMT.

"The stock looks expensive, especially when using headline earnings per share for valuation but we remain positive given the outlook for the U.S. and emerging markets and the Euroland recovery prospects," said Whitman Howard analyst Stephen Rawlinson.

(1 US dollar = 0.6367 British pound) (Reporting by Li-mei Hoang; editing by Jason Neely)