Friday, March 29, 2024

New man for Fonterrra Brands job

Avatar photo
Fonterra has appointed experienced fast-moving consumer goods executive Brett Henshaw to run Fonterra Brands New Zealand. He is managing director of Griffin’s Food Company and won’t begin at Fonterra until the first week of December.
Reading Time: 2 minutes

A New Zealander, Henshaw’s 30 years of experience includes time with Unilever and Coalgate-Palmolive in Sydney, Singapore, New York and Britain.

Former Fonterra Brands leader Leon Clement left earlier in the year and is now chief executive of Synlait.

Fonterra’s results for the 2018 financial year showed the NZ consumer and food service business is underperforming, providing a big contribution to the divisional earnings falling by 10% to $525 million.

In the Oceania region including Australia consumer and food service earnings fell by $20m to $67m.

Gross margin was down from 22% to 20% and volume fell 5% to 1656m litres after a 9% fall the previous financial year.

“Volumes were lower in NZ due to operational challenges while Australian volumes of cheese and butter grew,” the company said.

NZ earnings fell because of higher costs relating to its new distribution centre.

A new breakdown in divisional volumes, margins and earnings showed consumer products were three times the size in Oceania compared with food service products.

In China food service products greatly out-sell consumer products by nine times.

However, consumer volume grew by 24% with strong growth in all Anchor products.

Anchor UHT has become the number one imported brand, both in e-commerce and off-line sales.

Total consumer goods sales worldwide took 3152m litres, with nil growth, while food service accounted for 2438m litres, up 6%.

Those categories represent 12% and 11% respectively of Fonterra’s total sales volume of 22.2 billion litres in FY2018.

For volumes of consumer goods the biggest geographical region was Oceania at 39% followed by Asia, 36%, Latin America, 20%, and China, 4.5%.

For food service sales China was well in the lead with 52% followed by Asian markets, 26%, Oceania, 17%, and Latin America, 4%.

Gross margin in food service declined by an alarming amount, down from 22% to 16% because of the relatively high milk price input costs for making food service products.

Consumer gross margin fared better, at 28%, with new product launches in Asia and the revitalisation of the Anlene brand.

Total
0
Shares
People are also reading