It’s been a tough few years for Northern Ireland animal health powerhouse Norbrook. The company – founded and built up by Edward Haughey, later Lord Ballyedmond, until his untimely death in a helicopter crash in 2014 – has been struggling for growth.
In results filed in recent days, the company posted what its directors characterised as “disappointing” figures as sales came under pressure in a number of its markets.
“While the group took effective steps to mitigate the reduction in sales, the overall profit performance, while up on FY23, was disappointing,” the company said.
It might be up on the previous year, but only because those 2023 figures had included a £3.15 million (€3.77 million) exceptional charge relating to a redundancy programme that year. The £5.3 million pretax profit recorded in the 12 months to early August last year was lower than every other year in the past decade bar the Covid-hit 2020.
And it was certainly not what directors had teed up in their previous set of accounts. Having described the 2023 financial performance as, that word again, “disappointing versus what we had anticipated”, it said: “However, moving into FY24, we are confident that the business is well placed to take advantage of market opportunities and, as a result, we believe that financial performance will improve considerably as we move forward.”
That hasn’t materialised, at least not yet, despite the £26 million the company has invested in upgrading its manufacturing facilities over the past two years, and the “strong customer relationships” and “steady pipeline of new products” it keeps referring to each year in its accounts.
As it stands, sales have been stagnating. They are now more than 20 per cent below the peak of £275 million they hit in 2018 and barely above the £215 million reported a decade ago.
In that time, pretax profits have gone from £17 million to a high of £49.2 million (in 2017) and now back to mid-single digits. And the company employs 500 fewer people than it did in 2015.
Veteran Irish businessman Liam Nagle, who stepped into Haughey’s shoes in the business after the latter’s death, vacated the chief executive’s chair last year while retaining his position as company chairman.
[ NI animal health group Norbrook reports ‘disappointing’ performanceOpens in new window ]
In his stead, Andrea Iucci, a Netherlands-based Italian businessman with a CV spanning a career across both human and animal health, assumes the chief executive role.
What hasn’t changed is the company’s confidence in its future.
“Plans put in place in FY24 to increase sales are already bearing fruit and as a result the group believes that financial performance will improve considerably as we move forward,” directors said in those recent figures. Here’s hoping.
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