Chicken going cheap: Ingham’s plunges as divvy cut; Woolworths’ pivot bites

Ingham’s (ASX:ING) is seriously feeling the impact of Woolworths’ (ASX:WOW) CY25 move to find chicken from other suppliers, with the swap biting its bottom line to the tune of a 4c dividend payout versus 7c pcp.

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Earnings came in 33% lower vs pcp at $139.2M, and profits after tax sank -64% to $18.1M vs pcp. But the big kicker was FY26 guidance was downgraded to $180M–$200M.

Pre-market bets locked in a plummet to $2/sh, but as at 11am AEDT the stock recovered somewhat as investors scooped up cheap shares – though some HotCopper users, eyes on dividends, wondered whether a term deposit account might offer more value. Not a bad roast, but not the kind you can find at Woolies.

And it’s the Woolworths decision to look for chicken from other providers apart from Ingham’s, that decision made last year, that is really the story here. We know that, because Ingham’s says as much in a footnote on page three of its Friday report.

That there would be pain from that decision has long been known. The company had its struggles last year, which was most manifestly obvious when Ingham’s chief Edward Alexander flagged a cost-cutting program to slash $80M.

You can kind of reverse engineer what they were expecting to lose by that metric alone. And that program is still ongoing.

“A key driver of the guidance revision relates to the timing of the realisation of the operational improvements… the measures that have been implemented are taking longer than initially anticipated to translate into results and are now expected to be more heavily weighted towards the final quarter,” ING wrote Friday.

At the same time? Costs increased 5% (+$70M) in the first half of FY26.

ING last traded at $2.13/sh.

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