Strong Swiss franc hits Nestle earnings: company results

ZURICH, Aug 07 (AFP): The world's leading food industry group Nestle on Thursday posted slumping earnings and sales for the first half of the year, blaming the effect of a strong Swiss franc.
During the first six months of the year, the maker of Nespresso capsules and baby food among many other products, said it had made a net profit of 4.6 billion Swiss francs ($5.1 billion, 3.8 billion euros).
That marked a drop of about 9.5-per cent from the figure for the same period last year, and missed the expectations of analysts polled by AWP, who had anticipated a 4.9-billion-franc net profit.
The company's sales meanwhile shrank 4.8 per cent to 43 billion francs from a year ago. But Nestle stressed that "the strong Swiss Franc continued to have a substantial negative impact," emphasising that the strengthened currency had eroded its sales figure by 8.8 per cent.
The company's organic growth, considered a key indicator of its performance, had expanded 4.7 per cent during the six-month period, it pointed out.
That number was based on 2.9 per cent real internal growth, with the remaining 1.8 per cent attributable to pricing, Nestle said.
"We delivered solid, broad-based organic growth, driven by real internal growth and pricing in what is still a very volatile trading environment," company chief Paul Bulcke said in the earnings statement.