LJ Williams Ltd suf­fered a $2.4 mil­lion drop in prof­its for the nine months end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2014, but chair­man Kr­ish­na Ba­nadoors­ingh is op­ti­mistic the group will have a prof­itable year end.

Con­sol­i­dat­ed fi­nan­cial in­for­ma­tion post­ed to the T&T Stock Ex­change shows that the group had sales of $80.8 mil­lion. This was a slight in­crease over last year's fig­ure of $79.3 mil­lion. How­ev­er, prof­it for that pe­ri­od was $1.4 mil­lion com­pared to $3.8 for the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od in 2013.

In his re­view of the group's fi­nan­cial per­for­mance, Ba­hadoors­ingh said one of the com­pa­nies in the group, Movalite, had low­er rev­enues be­cause most of its ex­pect­ed con­tracts had been moved to the 2016 fi­nan­cial year.

He added the par­ent com­pa­ny was prof­itable but did not achieve bud­get and the hard­ware di­vi­sion con­tin­ued to face chal­lenges lo­cal­ly, while ex­port of ad­he­sives to cus­tomers in the Caribbean had been af­fect­ed by the down­turn in those economies.

Ba­hadoors­ingh said: "The food di­vi­sion had high­er sales over last year but had had high­er ex­pens­es as­so­ci­at­ed with its dri­ve to ex­pand dis­tri­b­u­tion. We ex­pect to have bet­ter re­sults in the food di­vi­sion as we reap the ben­e­fits of the ex­pand­ed dis­tri­b­u­tion."