The af­ter-tax loss­es suf­fered by Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd (TCL) dur­ing the first six months of 2012 were more than dou­ble the Clax­ton Bay ce­ment pro­duc­er's loss in 2011, ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny's sec­ond quar­ter re­port which was pub­lished this week. TCL's loss in the pe­ri­od from Jan­u­ary 1 to June 30 amount­ed to $169 mil­lion, com­pared with the $78 .2 mil­lion loss the com­pa­ny re­port­ed for the first six months of 2011.

For the first six months of 2012, TCL's group rev­enue to­talled $789.0m, which was 3.7 per cent more than the rev­enues re­port­ed in 2011, main­ly "due to high­er pric­ing as do­mes­tic and ex­port ce­ment vol­umes were 5 per cent and 24 per cent re­spec­tive­ly low­er than the pri­or year com­par­a­tives."

The TCL fi­nan­cial re­port in­di­cat­ed that the T&T and Bar­ba­dos mar­kets saw vol­ume de­clines of 12 per cent and 11 per cent re­spec­tive­ly due to soft de­mand whilst the low­er ex­ports were due to re­duced pro­duc­tion as a re­sult of the labour strike in Trinidad and plant dif­fi­cul­ties in Bar­ba­dos.

TCL not­ed that its Earn­ings be­fore In­ter­est, Tax­es, De­pre­ci­a­tion and Amor­ti­sa­tion (Ebit­da) de­clined to $33.9 mil­lion in 2012 com­pared with $42.6 mil­lion for the pri­or year pe­ri­od, at­tribut­ing the short­fall of ex­pec­ta­tions to the fact that "the first six months was sig­nif­i­cant­ly af­fect­ed by the gen­er­al labour strike at the Trinidad plant which start­ed on Feb­ru­ary 27 and con­tin­ued to May 26."

TCL said that it in­curred ad­di­tion­al re­struc­tur­ing ex­pens­es of $40.3 mil­lion in the six months as the ex­e­cu­tion of the debt re­struc­tur­ing agree­ments did not take place un­til May 10 and all con­di­tions prece­dent sat­is­fied un­til June 15. The com­pa­ny said that the ex­pens­es have to be record­ed in the month in which the le­gal and oth­er ad­vi­so­ry ser­vices are ren­dered.

As a re­sult of the debt re­struc­tur­ing agree­ment, on TCL's bal­ance sheet, loans amount­ing to $1.9 bil­lion have been re­clas­si­fied from cur­rent in­to loan term as the group com­plet­ed on June 15 its debt re­struc­tur­ing ex­er­cise. Re­pay­ment will com­mence in March 2013 and spread un­til De­cem­ber 2018 when a bul­let pay­ment rep­re­sent­ing 42.6 per cent of the re­struc­tured debt will be payable, TCL said.

Ad­dress­ing the com­pa­ny's out­look, the TCL fi­nan­cial state­ment said: "With the debt re­struc­tur­ing ex­er­cise com­plet­ed, the group has re­fo­cused on its busi­ness­es in a still chal­leng­ing en­vi­ron­ment." TCL said dur­ing the pe­ri­od of the strike, ce­ment and clink­er were im­port­ed to en­sure the do­mes­tic mar­ket was ad­e­quate­ly sup­plied at a high­er cost to the group, which meant that ex­port sales from the Trinidad plant were not pos­si­ble.

"The plants in Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos, at the same time, were not able to achieve ex­pect­ed pro­duc­tion lev­els, suf­fer­ing nu­mer­ous break­downs, due to in­ad­e­quate spares as a re­sult of a lack of work­ing cap­i­tal. The work­ing cap­i­tal dif­fi­cul­ty was reme­died in the last week of June with the ex­e­cu­tion of two sales con­tracts which re­sult­ed in ad­vanced pay­ments of US$12m in­to the group," ac­cord­ing to TCL.