THE current Riverina rice crop is close to 10 times larger than last year’s, helping boost SunRice’s financial results.
More than 417,000 paddy tonnes was being processed into value-added products for sale to customers in the rice exporter’s domestic and global markets.
The “resilient” results were revealed at SunRice’s annual general meeting last month, after a year in which the company responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and second consecutive year of near-record low rice production in the Riverina.
SunRice chief executive Rob Gordon said it was “pleasing to be now focused on accelerating growth as we look forward to improved earnings performance”.
“The past two years have been challenging, and I thank our employees for demonstrating remarkable dynamism, flexibility, innovation and resilience in weathering the storm,” Mr Gordon said.
SunRice delivered revenue of $1.03 billion, and net profit after tax of $18.3 million, down 9 per cent and 19 per cent, respectively, on the previous financial year.
The group also declared a fully-franked dividend of 33 cents per B-class share, and paid a record high Riverina rice price of $750 per tonne for medium grain Reiziq.
Last month SunRice announced it would offer fixed price contracts for limited volumes of key varieties, and a pool, ahead of the opening of the planting window for the next crop next month.
The pricing for the contracts was $400 for medium grain Reiziq and for the nw bold medium grain variety, V071.
There was strong demand from growers since contracting opened on August 18, with a substantial volume contracted prior to the closure of the offer on August 23. Based on this uptake and improved growing conditions, the group was confident that 2022 production should exceed the 417,000 paddy tonnes harvested in 2021.
Given ongoing volatility in the factors that influenced pool performance, SunRice said it was unable to provide estimated price range for the 2022 pool, which would be planted next month and processed and marketed in the 2023 financial year.
Factors included fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, world rice prices, milling yields and disruptions to global shipping and supply chains.
With the increased Riverina production, SunRice expected earnings to improve across most of its segments in the next 12 months.
The Australian Rice Pool Business would not record a loss, and would recover its fair share of overheads while supporting earnings improvement in FY2022 across other segments that used Riverina rice as an input in their production cycle.
