Austrian dairy enquiries continue

Following the €1.125 million fine for illegal price fixing for Austria’s largest dairy Berglandmilch, number two milk processor NÖM (Lower Austrian Dairy) is also helping the country’s business competition authority (BWB) with its enquiries into similar claimed offences with leading supermarket chains. NÖM chairman Alfred Berger says his board’s “conscience is clear”, though. One other dairy in the country’s top ten, Kärntenmilch (2011 turnover €91 m) has had its offices searched by the BWB. And continental press reports mid-May also say there may be further Austrian prosecutions concerning even larger international players in the dairy sector including Switzerland’s number one cheesemaker Emmi and Lactalis from France.

NÖM earned €329.5 m in sales 2011 although the net result was a loss of €7.3m. This was to a large extent due to difficulties in the British market, according to Berger. NÖM’s presence there is centred on what it describes as “one of Europe’s most technically advanced milk processing plants” in Telford (investment €62 m). At end of 2012 chairman Berger put total NÖM turnover target for that year at around €390 m, although this spring Austria’s leading financial papers reckoned the bottom line would still probably remain in the red despite a flourishing export trade with Italy where the daughter firm Latteria NÖM in Milan earned an estimated €50 million turnover in 2012.