Investing in Tate & Lyle can be a profoundly frustrating experience. As soon as the shares head above £8, something happens beyond the company’s control to push them back down again. They were there in mid-2013, before the impact of cheap Chinese competition for sucralose, the company’s long-awaited artificial sweetener.
The results to March 31 show that sucralose is finally providing the sort of contribution to profits that the board had long dreamed of, though the £52 million operating profit was swollen by a £15 million one-off from the release of excess stocks from the closure of a factory in Singapore.
The shares edged back above that £8 ceiling in early November. Then the world woke up to discover that Donald Trump was the US