Dangote Flour Mills (DFM) in Nigeria, 65.7% owned by South African consumer-goods company Tiger Brands, released yet another set of disappointing quarterly results this week. Combined with problems at Tiger Brands' Haco subsidiary in Kenya, the company has underperformed its peers over the past year and is under pressure to stop its cash burn in Africa.Tiger Brands now also faces competition as its crown jewel - bread baking in South Africa - is under attack from Pioneer Foods and Premier Foods.DFM' s cost of sales rose 13%, distribution expenses increased 17.2% and its operating loss went up 66.7% in its third quarter to June compared with a year earlier. It posted a total loss of R580-million, 110.8% worse than the previous year.story_article_left1"The company wants to inject some cash into DFM to stabilise the cash burn, but they're waiting for the [Nigerian] currency to devalue - and it isn't doing that," said John Thompson, an analyst at Investec Asset Management.Thompson said rising wheat prices, an inability to pass along price increases and a huge oversupply of wheat products in the market meant Tiger Brands had no pricing power."If they really wanted to recapitalise the Nigerian business and wanted to do so with a three-year view to build bakeries - which was their original strategic aim - they would need more than R2-billion in funding," he said. But he added that it was "a drop in the bucket compared with Tiger's R57-billion market cap".He said Nigeria's wheat market probably needed consolidation, which raised the question of Tiger Brands seeking a joint venture with another player.However, the option of walking away from DFM had never been taken off the table."Not everything is in their control. There's a good investment case to walk away, although it would leave some bad blood in Nigeria for a while."story_article_right2Bridgitte Backman, the head of public affairs at Tiger Brands, said this would not happen."We have indicated a DFM before-tax earnings break-even in 2017. A number of initiatives are under way. As is evident from the last couple of quarters, we have managed to improve DFM's operational performance," she said.Electus Fund Managers industrial analyst Damon Buss said the average Nigerian consumer was too poor to experiment with new brands, which meant Tiger was in for a long and costly journey to establish the brand trust it enjoyed in South Africa.Regarding Kenya, Buss and Thompson both said they were surprised it took so long for Tiger Brands to discover the scale of the fraud at Haco, of which Tiger Brands owns 51%.Readjusting Haco's financial statements reduced the Kenyan company's profit by a third for the six months to March.Back in South Africa, while Backman asserted Tiger continued to hold leading positions in its portfolio of brands, there is an intense push for market share."Competitors like Pioneer and Premier are rolling out capacity. Tiger will have to vie to maintain or increase its market share. The company can't take that for granted," said Thompson...