Greencore ‘happy’ with financial goals

Greencore, the Dublin-headquartered group which supplies convenience foods to all of Britain’s main supermarket chains, is very comfortable with its financial goals for the year, helped by sales from events around Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee, says chief executive Patrick Coveney.

“We had a very, very good, positive volume uplift associated with all the jubilee events” of early June, Mr Coveney said.

Business since then has been affected by flooding in many parts of Britain, “so there are swings and roundabouts”, he said.

Greencore, the world’s largest sandwich maker, continues to target “good underlying revenue growth and strong growth in adjusted earnings per share” for this financial year, he said.

Still, revenue growth from continuing operations will probably slow from the near 10% pace of the first half after Greencore bought the British food company Uniq plc, Mr Coveney said.

“With the size of our business and the maturity of some of these categories, to continue to target close to double-digit, like-for-like revenue growth, I don’t think makes a lot of sense.”

Greencore’s longer-term growth target of more than 5% is a more “balanced number”, he said.

Greencore sales for the first half ended Mar 30 from continuing operations rose 9.3% to £541.7m (€684.5m) and it recorded net income of £15.4m compared with a loss of £563,000 a year earlier.

The company last month acquired HC Schau & Son, a US fresh-food manufacturer. The acquisition was its second in the US in four months following the purchase of Marketfare Foods.

Bloomberg