JAMIE CARR: Tongaat Hulett’s porridge-like income streams
The venerable agriculture and agri-processing company has been given a pretty comprehensive caning by the market of late
There have been times when the wind is in the right direction, all the planets are suitably aligned and any corporate with half a claim to competence is banging out the HEPS growth north of 30% without even breaking a sweat. From the current viewpoint, this is like reading a Norse saga and looking back on a time when gods strode the earth and life was all war hammers, flaxen-haired wenches of unusual proportions and great buckets overflowing with mead. In the current market environment, it’s a good effort for a corporate to make any headway at all, and things are likely to get mighty Darwinian for anybody who’s not on top of their game. The retail sector is particularly tough, with a mass of operators in a crowded space competing for ever-dwindling disposable income, putting margins under the sort of pressure that has been known to turn carbon into diamond. This holds across all three major markets in which TFG trades — SA, the UK and Australia — and under such circumstances it’s do...
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