Dairy Crest reports strong Cathedral City sales
Overall Dairy Crest’s cheese and spreads businesses have performed in line with its expectations during the first quarter and the outlook for the full year remains unchanged. In the first quarter aggregate sales of four key brands, Cathedral City, Clover, Country Life and Frylight, were in line with the first quarter of last year. Cathedral City had another strong quarter, during which it has continued to grow sales and market share. The brand is now Britain’s 16th largest grocery brand and its seventy largest grocery online brand. Frylight has also continued to perform very strongly. However Clover and Country Life sales have fallen in a butter and spreads market that continues to decline.
The project to make demineralised whey powder and galacto-oligosaccharide (GOS) at Dairy Crest’s Davidstow creamery is nearing completion and it expects to start selling both these products in this financial year. The first full-year benefit from these new products, which gives Dairy Crest access to new sales channels in growing global markets, will come in the year ending 31 March 2017.
On 6 November 2014 Dairy Crest announced that it had agreed to sell the assets of its Dairies operations to Muller UK & Ireland Group. The sale has already received the approval of Dairy Crest’s shareholders but remains subject to that of the Competition and Markets Authority, which, as announced on 26 June 2015, is now looking at undertakings offered by Müller. A further update is expected on 21 August 2015.
Underlying cash generation is good and, as the year progresses, lower milk costs will make a significant difference to the carrying value of cheese stock and hence working capital.
As usual it is anticipated that Dairy Crest’s net debt will peak around the middle of the year. The usual stock build in the first half of the year reflects the seasonality of milk production, which has been high this year. Additionally it will reflect another six months where capital expenditure has exceeded depreciation as it completes the investments at Davidstow and Harper Adams University, the site of Dairy Crest’s new innovation centre.
Mark Allen, chief executive, comments, “The year has started off as we expected. Higher sales of Cathedral City and Frylight are encouraging in markets that remain challenging. Our demineralised whey and GOS projects are nearing completion and we will see the full benefits next year. We are also making progress with the sale of our Dairies operations and we expect this to complete before the end of 2015. Dairy Crest is well positioned for profitable and sustainable growth. Our full year expectations remain unchanged.”
