Maple Leaf Foods Inc. continues to slide.
However, depending on which newspaper you read, the company
either lost money, broke even or made a profit during the third quarter.
That’s because the news release from the company is both
misleading and missing some key information normally included in quarterly
financial reports
.
That left people to dig around in the data to come up with
their own conclusions.
Mine is that the company made no profit on sales of $1.15
billion, which were down by 2.5 per cent.
A year ago it made a profit of $11.4 million in the third
quarter.
For the first nine months, sales have declined by 3.36 per
cent to $3.36 billion.
Even the bakery division, where profits increased by 34 per
cent, sales in the third quarter were down by 2.5 per cent.
Sales in the protein group declined by 2.8 per cent and
there was a loss of $20 million and sales in the meat group declined by 2.1 per
cent and there was a loss of $43.6 million.
Chief executive officer and president Michael McCain said it
was a difficult third quarter, but insists the company’s plans are sound and
things will improve.
The plans include completion of a $536-million
meat-processing plant at Hamilton that will pave the way for closures at
smaller and older facilities, including the main Schneider Corp. plant in
Kitchener.
A new distribution centre near Highways 401 and 6 south of
Guelph is now operating, but there has been a loss because of the transition
from old to new facilities.
Maple Leaf has sold its potato processing business in
Western Canada, its Rothsay Concentrates rendering business to Darling
Industries of Texas and is fresh pasta business to Embro of Spain.
It might also sell its entire 90 per cent ownership of
Canada Bread, including the new plant opened in 2011 in Hamilton to consolidate
operations from several smaller and older facilities in Ontario.
