IWP would suffer sales losses of up to £1.5 million this month as a result of the Russian economic crisis, but the group was on target overall to continue to achieve annual growth of more than 10 per cent, the chief executive, Mr Joe Moran, said yesterday.

He said the Russian crisis would have an effect on IWP's August and September cosmetic export figures in particular and between £1 million and £1.5 million in sales for this month had been cancelled. "Our lorry containers were ready to go out and some of them were in the docks but we stopped them," he said.

IWP's chairman, Mr Frank Plunkett Dillon, told shareholders at the company's a.g.m. that difficulties were being experienced in its eastern European operations "mainly due to spin-off economic problems in Russia. We expect that these export markets will continue to present problems in the short term", he said.

Mr Moran said that the value of the Polish zloty had gone down by 10 per cent in August. "That would have an effect on any business which we would have outside of hard currencies," he added.

Following the £60 million acquisition of the Jeyes Group, he said he expected to increase its profit margin from 3.5 per cent to between 5 and 6 per cent. The acquisition, completed last month, would yield £3.5 million in savings in the first full financial year through its integration with IWP's British household products group, Sanoda. The arrival of the British cosmetics company, Yardley, on the market after it went into receivership with debts of £120 million sterling, had prompted some interest from IWP, Mr Moran added, although "on balance" the group would not make an offer for the group.

In June, IWP announced a 14 per cent increase in pre-tax profits of £25.6 million for the year to March 31st, 1998.