Astral Foods in South Africa announces a cyberattack and notes a steep decline in profits

With a recent cybersecurity attack aggravating the impact of lower chicken prices and rising input costs, Astral Foods (ARLJ.J), which opens a new tab, said Monday that it anticipates its half-year profit to drop by as much as 60%.

The leading chicken producer in South Africa reported that a cybersecurity incident on March 16 had a detrimental impact on its half-year profit of roughly 20 million rand ($1.10 million) due to disruption in processing and customer deliveries to its flagship division.

According to Astral’s first trading update, this was because of revenue losses and the additional expenses of clearing the production backlog.

According to the corporation, “no sensitive data or confidential information of customers, suppliers, or individual stakeholders was compromised as a result of the cyber intrusion,” and all business units were presently functioning normally.

According to Astral, reduced chicken prices due to tight consumer spending and higher feed input costs after last year’s drought might cause company profit to drop by as much as 60% in the six months ending March 31.