BUCKING THE TREND? Analysts fairly danced in the streets following the announcement of Cranswick Plc’s third quarter results. Sales increased by ten per cent on the equivalent period of 2010 building, as the company reported, on the momentum established in the first half of the year. Sales growth in the quarter of bacon and fresh pork products was particularly strong and there were positive contributions from all its other activities. Export sales remained buoyant and sales of pastry products continued to show ‘pleasing progress’. Cranswick, it will be remembered, used to have a feed mill


which was eventually sold in 2007 to BOCM Pauls. Previously in March 2000, they purchased another mill from AF Plc, Wellingore, just south of Lincoln, just prior to Carrs Billington’s acquisition of AF Plc; this they sold in 2004. This looks like a company that elected to focus exclusively on


what it had identified as core business rather than attempting to involve itself with the whole supply chain from feeding livestock to selling the final livestock product. Given their current set of results, it looks as if Cranswick was on the right track.


REPORTING RESULTS There is a great deal of financial news around relating to the livestock feed industry in January and February each year as Wynnstay report on their full year results for the twelve months ending 31 October and the NWF Group report on their first half ending 30 November. Both these companies are, of course, members of the Alternative Investment Market, an offshoot of the Stock Exchange and are thus obliged to provide investors, analysts and other interested parties with relevant information. In their interim statement, NWF reported that, during their June-


to-November 2011 first half, feeds had generated revenues of £60.1 million, up by almost 24 per cent compared to the same period a year earlier. This was achieved on the back of sales volumes which, at 210,000 tonnes, were 0.9 per cent down from the 212,000 tonnes sold in the equivalent period twelve months previously. Obviously, these figures imply a substantial increase in average price during the June-to-December 2011 run; dividing sales revenue by tonnage yields an average price of £286 compared to £229 a year earlier, a whopping increase of almost 25 per cent. How do these figures compare with the average increase in Great Britain during the period in question? Comparison is difficult because the ‘national’ statistics deal


with overall headings: cattle and calf feeds, sheep and lamb feeds and so on. It is, obviously, not possible to break down NWF’s sales by species except to say, as the Group says on its website that the Group concentrates on ruminant feeds – dairy, beef and sheep – while also able to deliver related products such as forage additives, grass and forage seeds, calf milk replacers and a range of speciality feeds. Taking the six months in question and adding up production in Great Britain of cattle and calf together with sheep and lamb feeds gives us a total of 1.97 million tonnes compared


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FEED COMPOUNDER MARCH 2012 PAGE 9


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