Poupart has posted a significant rise in turnover and pre-tax profit.
The fruit giant’s latest turnover figure of nearly £390 million surpasses the £380m figure with which Total Produce topped December 2014’s FPJ Big 50 businesses list.
According to the financial accounts – posted at Companies House – for the year ending 31 December 2014, as well as Poupart increasing its turnover figure from £327.4m to £389.3m, pre-tax profit also rose from £5.8m to £7.1m.
Poupart chairman Laurence Olins attributed the significant rise in turnover to the “benefits of past investments that enhanced the supply and availability of fruit.”
He added that the financial year had been a “satisfactory performance in the light of much more benign climatic conditions around the world, which resulted in product deflation of varying degrees for each of the group’s businesses.”
Poupart increased its investment in its continental European operations at the end of 2013, with the full year’s revenue being consolidated in the group’s results for the first time in 2014.
Olins said that in the most recent financial year, the group’s soft-fruit divisions “traded well” despite pressures from both customers and suppliers to sell their produce on “acceptable terms”.
In this part of the business, supportive weather conditions led to “significantly increased production”, and the group also acquired a stake in a marketing company in South Africa during the year as part of its strategy to invest in and develop varieties of blueberries.
While Poupart’s stonefruit business also had a “much improved” year, expanding its customer base and its shares of its customers’ stonefruit programmes, its top-fruit business, “as predicted”, suffered a drop in its turnover in the 2014 financial year.
However, Olins noted that the prospects for the current year on the top-fruit front are far more promising in the wake of winning new business.
The subsidiary companies Poupart had a 100 per cent stake in at the end of the financial year – and which had a major contribution to the overall turnover figure – were BerryWorld, Norton Folgate and OrchardWorld. It held 50 per cent of the shares in Dutch firms Fruto del Campo and Vitalberry, and had a 50 per cent stake in Spanish subsidiary Citrus Fruit SL.
