Innscor to focus on Zimbabwe operations

Innscor Africa reported a six percent increase in revenue from $554 million to $586 million in the full year to June driven by a growth in volumes across its business units.

In 2014, Innscor became the first Zimbabwean company to breach the $1 billion turnover mark. The company’s performance has somewhat tapered down since restructuring the conglomerate and focus on light manufacturing.

Nationals Foods, a subsidiary of Innscor registered a 13 percent increase in volumes to 560 000 tonnes while the Bakery business sold 141.7 million loaves during the year a 30 percent increase on prior year.

Earnings Before Income Tax Depreciation (EBITDA) was up two percent to $67 million while profit before tax declined six percent to $44.9 million.

Chief executive Julian Schonken said the company would conclude its restructuring by disposing its Zambian operations – Spar and The River Club – before year end to focus on its Zimbabwe businesses.

“Once we have concluded the disposal of the Zambian operations we are essentially Zimbabwean centric. We do need to look abroad but before we do that we have a lot of work to do in Zimbabwe,” he said.

“We have seen too many instances of good Zimbabwean operations ourselves included going into the region and really battling because educational levels are completely different, the infrastructure is not what we are used to, there is bureaucracy. So we are going to be careful about the way we do business before we go to other geographies,” said Schonken.

Looking ahead, Schonken said the group would have to address a ballooning cost base.

“We still have a long way to go in getting our costs down to really where they should be. We want to be able to compete in an open economy and we know that our cost base is too high. We need to migrate our costs from a fixed component and get our structures absolutely as lean as possible,” said Schonken.- The Source

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