Swedish company Oriflame Cosmetics SA said its pretax profit dropped 39% year-on-year to EUR9.1m in the third quarter of 2010, undershooting the market consensus for EUR17.9m. The result was pulled down by negative currency effects of EUR12.8m.

Both the result and the market consensus exclude restructuring costs, which amounted to EUR11.8m in July-September 2010, mostly related to the closure of Oriflame’s operations in Iran.

For the full 2010, Luxembourg-based Oriflame now expects a sales growth of some 9% in local currencies and operating margins of around 11% at current exchange rates. The previous guidance had been for a sales growth of 10% and operating margins of 12%. Sales rose 21% year-on-year to EUR336.6m in the third quarter of 2010. In local currencies the growth was 10%. Analysts polled by SME Direkt had on average forecast sales of EUR334m.

Operating profit, excluding restructuring costs, grew 26% to EUR27.1m and the operating margin improved to 8% from 7.8%. Here the analysts had expected a profit of EUR28.5m and a margin of 8.5%. The net result, including restructuring costs, was a loss of EUR4.7m in the third quarter of 2010 versus a year-earlier profit of EUR13.4m.

For the first nine months of the year, net profit increased to EUR61.8m from EUR60.2m in the corresponding period in 2009.