Solid Performance by Milk Link
Reflecting higher selling prices, a better mix of products and a 5% increase in the volume of milk handled to just over 1.5 billion litres, UK dairy co-operative Milk Link increased sales by 6.6% to £586m for the year ended April 2nd 2011 and lifted profit before tax by 43% to £15.1m. EBITDA rose from £29.2m to £34.4m
Milk Link processed 58% of the milk handled through its own production facilities – up from 54% in the preceding year – processing an additional 99 million litres.
Neil Kennedy, chief executive of Milk Link.
“Over the last 12 months Milk Link has delivered solid results despite very challenging economic and trading conditions, particularly in our core consumer retail and foodservice markets,” says Neil Kennedy, chief executive of Milk Link. “We continued to strengthen our business financially, commercially and operationally; streamline our business by implementing programmes to deliver greater operational efficiencies and cost control as we sought to offset significant cost inflation in our processing and haulage operations; and develop our business for the future by investing in a number of strategic added value infrastructure projects. Most importantly, we were able to deliver improved returns to our Members in relation to both their milk price and their investment in the processing business they own.”
In January, Milk Link acquired the Cornish Country Larder soft cheese business for a total consideration of £7.1m to strengthen its position as a leading producer of British cheeses. In December, Milk Link formed a strategic partnership with Volac to jointly undertake a joint £12m investment to create a state of the art, added value whey processing operation.
Later in the new financial year, the dairy co-operative plans to evolve the business structure into two business units: Milk Link – Cheese and Milk Link – Milk, whilst retaining key cross-group functions of finance, IT, human resources, supply chain and corporate affairs. The change is designed to enable Milk Link to put greater focus on growing its core businesses while at the same time moving forward with the next stage of its corporate development strategy.
