Hulamin's H1 operating profit up 86% in soft market conditions

<p>South Africa's leading aluminium manufacturer Hulamin announced its unaudited interim results for the half-year period ended 30 June 2016. Operating profit of the company increased 86 per cent year-on-year while revenue soared 25 per cent y-o-y to reach R4.9 billion due to soft market conditions.<br /><br />Hulamin's total sales volume grew 19 per cent y-o-y during the period under review; the rolled products segment sales alone was up by 21 per cent.<br /><br />The aluminium fabricators reported improved sales mitigation which resulted in consistent manufacturing output during H1.</p> <p><img style="vertical-align: middle; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" src="http://www.alcircle.com/uploads/images/Hulamin.jpg" alt="" width="960" height="260" /><br /><br />Richard Jacob, CEO, commented: "Improved manufacturing performance in Hulamin Rolled Products underpins this pleasing&nbsp; set of results. This, together with a weaker Rand on average against the US Dollar during the six months under review, mitigated the effects of continued weak global and local market conditions, local inflation and softer rolling margins."<br /><br />"Efforts to address cost reduction opportunities and operational efficiency improvements achieved further gains in unit costs, product yields, overall sales volumes and product mix. For the balance of 2016 we expect can body stock volumes to increase in both local and export markets allowing us to source more scrap metal units locally. Efforts continue towards further improving our cost and rolling margin performance, albeit in market conditions that we forecast to remain challenging."</p>