Aleem Khan

Pres­tige Hold­ings Ltd, op­er­a­tor of the KFC, Piz­za Hut, Sub­way and TGI Fri­days fran­chis­es, re­port­ed a 49 per cent in­crease in prof­it for the first nine months of fis­cal 2014. On the rec­om­men­da­tion of the board, an in­ter­im div­i­dend of 15 cents per com­mon share–up from 2013's 12 cents per share–was paid Mon­day to share­hold­ers whose names ap­peared on the reg­is­ter of mem­bers on Oc­to­ber 7.

"For the first nine months of fis­cal 2014, group rev­enue in­creased by 4 per cent to $697 mil­lion, and prof­it at­trib­ut­able to share­hold­ers in­creased by 49 per cent from $24.3 mil­lion to $36.3 mil­lion," Pres­tige Hold­ings chair­man Chris­t­ian Mout­tet said in his re­port on the com­pa­ny's re­sults, re­leased on the T&T Stock Ex­change on Sep­tem­ber 30.

Mout­tet said: "A sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of this in­crease in prof­itabil­i­ty, when com­pared to pri­or year, is due to the $8.7 mil­lion write off of our in­vest­ment in the Bar­ba­dos TGI Fri­days restau­rant in the same pe­ri­od last year. Ex­clu­sive of this, prof­it af­ter tax on con­tin­ued op­er­a­tions and earn­ings per share in­creased by 16 per cent."

These re­sults were gen­er­at­ed from an av­er­age num­ber of 110 restau­rants, he said.

"We con­tin­ue to see pos­i­tive trends in our TGI Fri­days and Piz­za Hut brands dri­ven by ex­cit­ing food of­fer­ings and im­prov­ing cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence. More re­cent­ly, we have seen a slow­ing of mo­men­tum in our two quick ser­vice restau­rant (QSR) brands, KFC and Sub­way, pri­mar­i­ly due to con­tin­u­ing se­vere labour chal­lenges which have wors­ened in re­cent months," he said.

Mout­tet added: "Man­age­ment is pur­su­ing ini­tia­tives to ad­dress this but, ul­ti­mate­ly, a macro so­lu­tion is re­quired at the na­tion­al lev­el to tack­le this prob­lem if we are to have a long term and sus­tain­able so­lu­tion.

"Based on the cur­rent per­for­mance we ex­pect im­proved re­sults for the cur­rent year."