The move to ‘buy the dip’ is likely to be seen as an endorsement by an insider of shares that took a battering this week after the group announced a rare decline in revenues for 2025, driven largely by the weaker dollar.
On Tuesday, Kerry Group named Ms Dawson, a Mars executive until 2022, to replace the current chair, Tom Moran, who is due to retire after the annual general meeting on April 30.
The chair’s role commands significant remuneration – Mr Moran’s fee as chair was €419,000, according to the 2024 annual report, compared to the €133,000 Ms Dawson was paid as a non-executive director.
Before he joined the Kerry board, Mr Moran was a senior civil servant, ending that career as Secretary General of the Irish Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine.
Ms Dawson’s background is in industry. She grew up in Churchtown, Dublin and studied business and social studies at Trinity College Dublin, before joining food giant Mars and rising through the ranks there across a number of countries and roles.
In 2020, she retired from after 33 years with Mars, where she was ultimately global president of Mars Food, multisales and global customers.
She has been a non-executive director at Kerry Group since 2022 and also sits in the boards of Marks & Spencer, Reckitt and Lego. Meanwhile, shares in Kerry fell further on Wednesday after Tuesday’s steep decline and have lost close to 10pc of their value in recent days.
That didn’t deter Ms Dawson, who bought 756 shares on Tuesday at a price of £65.15 (€74.63) each – a total acquisition of £49,253 or €56,420.
The most recent Kerry Group annual report showed Ms Dawson had held a modest 167 of the group’s shares when it was prepared at the end of 2024.
Kerry shareholders will be glad of any signal of support this week, after sustained share price falls on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The stock dropped after Kerry Group reported a 2.5pc decline in revenue last year, to €6.758bn. Sales volumes, margins and earnings per share (EPS) were all up, however, in the first full year since the sale of the relatively lower-margin Irish dairy business to Kerry Co-op.
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