19 May 2020

McBride plc

Trading Update

McBride plc (the "Group"), the leading European manufacturer and supplier of Contract Manufactured and Private Label products for the domestic Household and professional cleaning and hygiene markets, today provides a trading update for the current financial year, ending 30 June 2020.

Further to our update on 25 March 2020, demand levels in our Household business have moderated from the surge seen in many markets as countries went into lockdown but encouragingly remain above the run-rate levels seen before March.These higher demand levels are evident in most of our major markets and apply mostly to surface cleaning and dishwashing products, with more limited impact in laundry products.

Our teams have worked well to address the early challenges of staff shortages, material availability and distribution blockages and all factories are currently operating at more normal activity levels. As anticipated in our March update, we have seen lower input pricing in this period although some of this benefit has been tempered by one off COVID-19 related operating costs. 

The Group's Aerosols business is benefiting from sales of new hand sanitiser products and as a result will deliver a profit improvement in the final quarter, supported by investment in additional production capacity.

As a consequence the Board now expects full year adjusted profit before tax to be approximately 15% ahead of current market expectations (*) and for net debt at 30 June 2020 to be lower than expectations.

The Group will issue a year end trading statement on 14 July 2020 and preliminary results are scheduled to be announced on 8 September 2020.

(*)Current market expectations refer to a Group compiled consensus for FY20 of adjusted PBT £18.6m.

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Note: This announcement contains inside information which is disclosed in accordance with the Market Abuse Regulation which came into effect on 3 July 2016.

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