SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Chris Schutte, CEO of Astral. Astral had results out for the six months ending March. It saw revenue up 26%, headline earnings per share up 138%, and a dividend of R7.90 – that up from R3 in the previous period.
SIMON BROWN: I take your point on that. Your broiler sales up 15.7%. You’ve mentioned obviously it’s the comparative period, that the previous would’ve been to March 2021. We had hard lockdowns and then we had curfews and the like. So QSRs [quick-service restaurants] were under pressure.
So we spent over R1 billion over the last two-and-a-half years, and part of this is obviously the volume increase that is now in lieu of that investment, but we also sold a bit out of stock. We had quite high ending stocks [in] the previous period. So we sold higher production volumes out of stock, and then we also had a bit of a positive mix in our basket of products, which contributed a bit towards the better margin.
SIMON BROWN: The one point we probably raise every time we chat imports – we are looking at the results – [is] imports remain, frankly, massively high in our market. We also during this period created 350 additional permanent jobs and our expansion is not done yet. We plan to expand by another approximate 8% over the next year. So we will bump up our weekly processing numbers to about 6.2 million birds a week; a year ago we were at about 5.5 million. So a nice investment for the country and it’s paying off.