Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Port De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion Lim­it­ed (Plipde­co) has re­port­ed a 358 per cent in­crease in its 2015 first quar­ter prof­its over the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od last year, from $3.3 mil­lion to $15.3 mil­lion.

In his re­port to share­hold­ers. chair­man Ian Ather­ly said the com­pa­ny's con­sol­i­dat­ed rev­enues grew by 19.6 per cent. Con­tainer­ized car­go op­er­a­tions ex­pe­ri­enced a 25 per cent in­crease in vol­ume but there was a 13 per cent de­cline the vol­ume of gen­er­al car­go op­er­a­tions com­pared to the lev­els record­ed in 2014.

He said: "Fur­ther analy­sis in­di­cates that for con­tainer­ised car­go there was a 10 per cent in­crease in im­ports, an 11 per cent in­crease in ex­ports and a 94 per cent in­crease in trans­ship­ment car­go. For gen­er­al car­go there was an 88 per cent de­crease in ex­ports, a 7 per cent in­crease in im­ports and a 320 per cent in­crease in trans­ship­ment." Plipde­co's to­tal as­sets grew to $2.33 bil­lion–an in­crease of 3 per cent from De­cem­ber 2014 when the as­set base was $2.26 bil­lion. Work­ing cap­i­tal im­proved from $49 mil­lion at De­cem­ber 2014 to $65 mil­lion in March 2015.

"In 2015, Plipde­co will con­tin­ue to em­bark on var­i­ous en­deav­ours as de­ter­mined in its strate­gic plan. These in­clude among oth­er things in­fra­struc­tur­al im­prove­ments, in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy up­grades (some al­ready im­ple­ment­ed dur­ing the first quar­ter 2015), and con­tin­u­a­tion of the Port ex­pan­sion project," Ather­ly said.

"The pre­ced­ing un­der­tak­ings would fur­ther en­hance ef­fi­cien­cy and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty to ef­fec­tive­ly po­si­tion Pilpde­co in its dri­ve to­wards con­tin­ued growth and in­creased share­hold­er val­ue." Plipde­co, a pub­lic com­pa­ny owned 51 per cent by Gov­ern­ment and 49 per cent by pri­vate share­hold­ers and in­cor­po­rat­ed on Sep­tem­ber, 16 1966.