One of the world’s biggest suppliers of food ingredients, Olam International is planning to list on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), a move that could send it shares into the FTSE 100.
A report hinted that the company’s food ingredients division will be floated in the first half of 2022.
The company with an agricultural trading group based in Singapore, said recently that it would float its food ingredients division in the UK in the first six months of next year.
According to the report, the company seeks to join the exchange’s premium listing, which requires tighter governance standards and could achieve a multibillion-pound market value that would make it eligible to join the FTSE 100 index of Britain’s biggest quoted companies.
Olam Food Ingredients is also targeting a secondary listing in Singapore, where its parent company is a member of the stock market. Olam International was founded in Nigeria in 1989.
Meanwhile, the has released its annual results with operating profit gaining 36 per cent to $667.8 million, but taking into account exceptional costs, the figure was in fact down 22per cent to $245.7 million, largely due to costs associated with its palm oil facilities in Gabon.
The Group’s revenue rose by 8.6 per cent year-on-year to $35.8 billion as the business moved to tackled pandemic conditions.
As the company explained, its key move to separate its activities into two main divisions, global agri (producing $21.5 billion in revenues for last year), and Food Ingredients (delivering $12.5 billion for 2020), including cocoa, had remained on track and is an integral part of its overall business strategy.
However, the company noted an improving picture for the second half of the year, in which revenues grew at a higher rate of 9.9per cent (totalling 18.7 billion for the second half), as its business adapted to global conditions.
There were encouraging signs for its food ingredients division (including cocoa, below), with its $12.5 billion revenue figure for the year representing a 3.3per cent increase over 2020’s results, driven by volume growth, as well as higher selling prices in its value-added food ingredients and solutions segment.
EBIT results were reported at $771 million for last year for ingredients, which was down 2.8per cent, attributed to the impact of Covid-19 on the company in the first half of 2020. The business noted that 2019 had proved an exceptionally strong year, propelled by the rise of its cocoa operations.
Olam Co-Founder and Group CEO, Sunny Verghese in a statement said: “We delivered strong growth in Operational PATMI of 36per cent to S$677.8 million for 2020, reflecting the strength of our operating groups and their constituent businesses, while achieving significant progress in our transformative Re-organisation Plan and we are excited about the sustained value creation potential arising from this re-organisation.
“Our success is underpinned by a radically different sustainability offering, enabled by technology that has strengthened our strategic partnerships with our customers. This performance is also a result of the skill and resourcefulness of our team to capture market opportunities, strong risk management discipline and demonstrated operational capability.
“We are particularly pleased to have successfully navigated through Covid-19 thus far by focusing on the safety and well-being of our employees, ensuring food safety to our customers, robust business continuity plans in each of our sites and locations, managing through demand, supply and financial shocks, and partnering with our communities to support them with Covid-19 assistance and resilience measures.
“We are seeing market conditions and sentiments beginning to improve as economies snapback from the worst impacts of Covid-19 in 2020 and we expect this favourable market environment to continue to improve in 2021.”
