Cybersecurity breach costs Astral R20 million in profit

Poultry producer Astral Foods reported that a cybersecurity breach experienced on 16 March has cost it approximately R20 million in profit.

Astral said the cybersecurity incident negatively impacted the Poultry Division by causing processing and customer delivery downtime.

Astral says nothing was compromised

It also confirmed that no confidential information or sensitive data of customers, suppliers or individual stakeholders was compromised.

“At the date of this announcement, all business units are operating normally following the recovery of our systems,” said the poultry producer on Monday.

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In the group’s voluntary trading update, the poultry producer said price deflation on chicken sales would continue to place severe pressure on broiler net margins.

Vulnerable time

“On the back of a constrained consumer environment and extensive retail promotional activity on frozen chicken, selling prices for the six months ending 31 March 2025 remained under pressure.

“Together with an increase in poultry feed input costs following the drought of 2024 and higher local maize prices, earnings for the first half of 2025 will be lower than a strong set of results for the period ended 31 March 2024.”

However, despite these headwinds, the group said its balance sheet position remains strong, supported by healthy cash generation for the period under review.

“Astral has reasonable certainty that earnings per share (“EPS”) and headline earnings per share (“HEPS”) for the six months ending 31 March 2025, are expected to decrease by no more than 55% and 60% respectively, being EPS of 415 cents and HEPS of 354 cents, compared to the six months ended 31 March 2024.”

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