The American food company Kraft Heinz has achieved a higher profit in the last quarter, while sales have fallen slightly. That results came out, which attempted to acquire its fellow consumer goods maker Unilever earlier this year, on Thursday after the closing bell on Wall Street.
Profit at the end of three months through June climbed by 50 percent to $1.2 billion, especially helped by cost savings. Revenue decreased by almost 2 percent to less than $6.7 billion. This was due to negative exchange rate effects. But the company also saw the decline in similar sales, partly by headwinds on the American home market and in Europe.
Kraft Heinz has announced a reduction of $1.7 billion in annual costs up to 2018 with an aim to improve profitability. The group has, among other things, to meet consumers’ demand for more healthy food instead of processed foods.
CEO Bernardo Hees of Kraft Heinz pointed out that the figures are better than what they reported in the first quarter of this year, and also beat their own expectations. He thinks that this improvement will continue in the second half of this year.
Separately, Kraft Heinz has reported that its board of directors gave green light to an increase in the company’s quarterly dividend to $0.625 a share, up nearly 4.2% as compared to the prior quarterly dividend rate of $0.60 a share. The dividend will be paid on Sept. 15 to stockholders of Aug. 18.
The maker of the well-known square-action cameras GoPro posted a significantly lower loss in the second quarter than a year earlier, with sales that went up steeply. This is apparent from figures released on Thursday after the close of the stock exchange trade in New York.
Net loss for the quarter was $30.5 million versus almost $92 million a year earlier. GoPro has, among other things, cut a great deal of workforce in order to reduce costs. On the other hand, revenue rose by over 34 percent to over $296 million, mainly due to higher sales of its cameras.
Barron’s reported citing Morgan Stanley analyst Yuuji Anderson that he is optimistic about GoPro’s recently announced QuikStories feature, which makes it easier for users to get edited footage off their cameras. “The update is a meaningful step in the right direction,” he writes, and GoPro seems to be continuing down that path with its work on virtual-reality editing capabilities. The company’s efforts here “can help meaningfully differentiate GoPro’s software platform versus. competitor ecosystems,” Anderson adds.
