Parmalat French and UK units sold
this week. After much speculation over the the stability of the
company's units outside Italy it appears that if the company is to
survive it will have to focus on its Italian operations.
Northern Irish company, Dale Farm Group, announced yesterday that it had bought Parmalat's dairy processing site at Kendal in Crumbria. Since the the financial crisis surfaced last year, employees at the plant feared that their futures would not be secure. Dale Farm Group have clarified that it will be able to employ all of the workers at the site.
The company has not disclosed how much it paid for the site. The plant will now trade as Dale Farm Kendal Limited and will produce yoghurt and cottage cheese products under the brand name Losely and Lakeland Maid.
Meanwhile in France it has been reported that two of the company' factories have been sold to the French dairy group Lactalis. The factories in Carpiquet and Athis de l'orne produce annually 25 million litres of milk and 2,800 tons of mozzarella cheese.
When the group's financial fraud erupted late last year some industry observers predicted that foreign units of the company would be sold and that it would have to focus on the future of its domestic units.
John Band, an analyst from Datamonitor claimed that the Parmalat administrators are of course interested primarily in saving Italian jobs, and what happens to Parmalat's business outside Italy is far less important to them.
Elsewhere, Parmalat's Mexican plant has said that it will pay employee wage but is unable to pay farmer who supply the company with milk.
