Recent financial disclosures by Spanish seafood giant Pescanova show the company’s year-to-date turnover has dropped slightly in 2014 compared to the previous year.
Pescanova’s third quarterly financial report of 2014, the latest official financial report available, shows a consolidated turnover between January and September of 2014 of EUR 706 million (USD 874 million), which represents a decrease of a 7.5 percent in comparison with the same period of the previous year, when they reached the EUR 763.1 million (USD 945,402).
The quarterly report, sent to the Spanish National Stock Market (CNMV), noted the deviation from 2013 is focused on the first three months, because is the “period where the settlement stock was accelerated in order to get liquidity during the months before to the file for a creditors arrangement in 2013,” according to the report.
A source at Pescanova explained to SeafoodSource that the closure of the accounts has not been completed, and therefore, the company could not calculate the performance figures of 2014, even on a preliminary basis. Pescanova has to send this information next January to the CNMV, so comparisons with previous years may not be possible until then.
The information about the last quarter of the year is of fundamental importance to the accumulated of the year for Pescanova, because the Christmas campaign is very important to its sales. For example, in 2013 the accumulated sales in September had reached EUR 763.1 million (USD 949.2 million), and in the end of the year accumulated sales totaled EUR 1 billion (USD 1.3 billion).
For nearly two years now, Pescanova has been struggling to get out from under a massive financial scandal that started in February 2013, when the company refused to disclose its debts. That led to an investigation by Spanish financial regulators that uncovered massive malfeasance leading to the removal and replacement of the company’s chairman and CEO, along with the company’s entire board of directors. Now, the company is under new management, and has signed an agreement with regulators and its creditors to settle its debts and allow Pescanova to continue to operate.
The Pescanova source confirmed to SeafoodSource that as of now the company doesn’t have data to give a forecast about the group’s gross profit in 2014. Nevertheless, the same source highlighted that as a consequence of the implementation in the exercise of the revenues for the discharge of the debt of the banks, the gross profit will be considerably higher than the EUR 70 million (USD 86.95 million) that regional Spanish media is reporting. According to the financial report of the third quarter of 2014 the result before taxes of the group was EUR 1.9 billion (USD 2.4 billion) in comparison with the negative amount of EUR 674.5 million (USD 834.8 million) in 2013, that the group explained “it comes from the discount of the debt in those societies with the creditors’ arrangement already approved.”
The net worth of the group is still negative EUR 432.6 million (USD 535.3 million), although Pescanova forecasts the condition “will be better with the expected approval of the creditors agreements of the Spanish subsidiaries that nowadays are in a creditor agreement,” according to the balance sheet of the 3Q 2014 report.
During the third quarter of the year a total of nine subsidiaries and an associated society filed for the bankruptcy proceedings, following the approved Pescanova creditor’s agreement.
