McBride’s recently appointed chief executive Chris Bull appears to have steadied the ship at the private label cleaning products manufacturer. The ex-Unilever man joined the company in May and was faced almost immediately with the tricky position of soft sales growth combined with rising raw material input costs which, according to this week’s trading update, remain.
Restructuring programmes are under way to create a leaner operational performance and some of the raw material cost hikes will be recovered from customers, albeit with some time lag. Trading is proving resilient though, with revenues at constant currencies up by 1 per cent since July despite the exit from a low-margin business in Spain and the tough comparatives with the corresponding period last year when anti-bacterial product sales were strong on the back of the swine flu scare.
When: 12 February 2010
Price: 224p
Performance to date: -21%
