The company’s third quarter results to the end of June reported record cash flows from operations of $864 million and a sales increase of 4% to approximately $10.1 billion.
However, Donnie Smith, Tyson Foods’ president and CEO, said: “Our beef business suffered from export market disruptions that had an $84m impact on third quarter results.
“We continue to see very high cattle costs at a time when product values and export issues are making it difficult to realize expected revenue levels in this spread business.”
Chicken and prepared foods
Tyson Foods also revealed that strong chicken sales and prepared foods drove record adjusted operating income up 40% to $568m.
“The Prepared Foods and Chicken segments performed very well in the fiscal third quarter while managing numerous challenges,” said Smith.
“The strong results in these two segments demonstrate the benefits of our branded, value-added product portfolio and multi-channel, multi-protein business model by partially offsetting soft results in the Beef and Pork segments.
Beef market conditions
"While we are pleased with the performance of our business overall, unless beef market conditions improve rapidly, we will not achieve our previous guidance of $3.30-$3.40 adjusted earnings per share,” he said. “As a result, we are modifying fiscal 2015 guidance to $3.10-$3.20 adjusted EPS.”
The company said that in 2016 it expects domestic protein production (chicken, beef, pork and turkey) to increase approximately 3% from fiscal 2015 levels.