Unilever Caribbean Lim­it­ed suf­fered a 6.7 per cent de­cline in rev­enue in 2015 and prof­it af­ter tax fell to $44.5 mil­lion. Chair­man Pablo Gar­ri­do said the com­pa­ny's dis­ap­point­ing per­for­mance was in­ten­si­fied by the show­down in the T&T econ­o­my and re­gion­al mar­kets.

He told share­hold­ers: "Our re­sults re­flect the dif­fi­cul­ties en­coun­tered in our first quar­ter, aris­ing from the re­struc­tur­ing of our core busi­ness fun­da­men­tals, which is an in­vest­ment in the fu­ture of Unilever Caribbean."

Com­ment­ing fur­ther on Unilever's au­dit­ed re­sults, which have been post­ed to the T&T Stock Ex­change, Gar­ri­do said: "Our be­low par per­for­mance, as a re­sult of the com­pli­ca­tions in the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the new IT sys­tem and the weak econ­o­my, was mit­i­gat­ed by the ex­tra­or­di­nary ef­forts of our em­ploy­ees who ral­lied as a team to solve the is­sues, con­trol costs and in­crease ef­fi­cien­cies.

He said al­though the economies of the re­gion will re­main de­pressed, the out­look for 2016 is cau­tious­ly op­ti­mistic as the com­pa­ny be­gins to reap the ben­e­fits of in­vest­ments in tech­nol­o­gy and con­tin­ues to care­ful­ly man­age our costs. He said in the com­ing months "a vast and com­pre­hen­sive mod­erni­sa­tion pro­gramme" will be im­ple­ment­ed in Unilever's man­u­fac­tur­ing plants.

Unilever Caribbean Lim­it­ed man­u­fac­tures and sells home care, per­son­al care, re­fresh­ment, and food prod­ucts pri­mar­i­ly in T&T, and oth­er Caribbean coun­tries.