On March 25, Cholimex Food Joint Stock Company (Cholimex Food, CMF code) will finalize the list of shareholders to attend the 2024 Annual General Meeting. Cholimex Food will announce the time and location of the annual general meeting to shareholders later. At the Meeting, the Board of Directors will present to shareholders the business plan for 2024 as well as the profit distribution plan for 2023.
Meanwhile, CMF will also finalize the list of shareholders to receive a 50% cash dividend advance for 2023, equivalent to 5,000 VND for each share owned.
With 8.1 million outstanding shares, Cholimex Food is expected to allocate about 40.5 billion VND to pay shareholders. The company is expected to make the payment on May 10, 2024.
Since its listing in 2016, Cholimex Food has never forgotten to pay cash dividends to shareholders. Especially, if the payment is completed in May this year, it will be the 5th consecutive year from 2019-2023 that the company pays a 50% dividend (5,000 VND/share). Prior to that, in 2016 and 2017, the company paid a 20% cash dividend, and in 2018, it was 30%.
Cholimex Food’s shareholder structure is quite concentrated with 3 major shareholders holding 92.55% of the capital. Among them, the Ho Chi Minh City Import-Export and Investment Joint Stock Company (Cholimex) holds 40.72%, Masan Trading and Investment Limited Liability Company holds 32.83%, and Nichirei Foods Inc holds 19% of the shares. Therefore, these 3 organizations will receive dividends of approximately 16.5 billion VND, 13 billion VND, and nearly 8 billion VND respectively.
Due to the concentrated shareholder structure, CMF shares have low trading volume on the market and many sessions with low liquidity. Closing the session on March 4, the market price reached 209,900 VND/share, an increase of nearly 3% since the beginning of 2024.
Cholimex is known for its products such as soy sauce, chili sauce, fish sauce… Cholimex Food has been participating in the chili sauce market since the late 1980s and is still one of the leading companies in the industry along with Masan, Trung Thanh, Nosafood… The company has established a distribution system in all 63 provinces and cities nationwide, distributing through popular channels such as Metro, Co.op Mart, BigC…
In 2014, Masan, the “giant” in the food retail sector, wanted to increase its influence by publicly offering to buy 49% of Cholimex Food’s shares at a price of 90,000 VND/share, equivalent to a valuation of the company at 730 billion VND. However, Masan was rejected by the existing major shareholders, Cholimex and Nichirei Food.
After rejecting Masan’s offer, Cholimex Food’s business results continued to flourish in the following years, especially after exceeding hundreds of billions in profit in 2018. Accumulated for the whole year 2022, net revenue reached 3,219 billion VND, an increase of 28% compared to the previous year. Net profit was 277 billion VND, an increase of over 19%.
In 2023, Cholimex Food plans to achieve a total revenue of 3,730 billion VND and an expected pre-tax profit of 310 billion VND, corresponding to an increase of 16% and 12% compared to the performance in 2022. Currently, the company has not announced the business results for 2023.
