Tate & Lyle
Sales £1.38bn Dividend 8.2p
There is no doubt that this year has been a horrible one for Tate & Lyle, with two profit warnings, even if one might doubt whether a slide in the price of one of your most promising products because of increasing competition warrants being described as a one-off.
There were three main hits. The cold US winter meant disruption there, so the company went into the spring with lower stocks than normal. There was a fire at the factory in Singapore making sucralose, the artificial sweetener that Tate has been working on for four decades.
Both of these meant that there were extra costs in keeping long-term customers supplied. The hit was £31 million in the first half