Agos­ti­ni’s Ltd yes­ter­day re­port­ed af­ter-tax prof­it of $323.4 mil­lion in its fi­nan­cial year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2024, 11.3 per cent less than the $364.6 mil­lion the group earned in its 2023 fi­nan­cial year.

The com­pa­ny said its prof­it at­trib­ut­able to share­hold­ers, be­fore the one-off net gains on ac­qui­si­tions in 2023, im­proved by 10 per cent, from $221 mil­lion in 2023 to $242 mil­lion in 2024.

The mul­ti-line group re­port­ed rev­enue of $5.09 bil­lion, an in­crease of 8.74 per cent, com­pared to the $4.68 bil­lion it gen­er­at­ed in 2023.

In his chair­man’s re­port, Agos­ti­ni’s Chris­t­ian Mout­tet not­ed the group had ge­o­graph­i­cal­ly ex­pand­ed its phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and health­care busi­ness with the ac­qui­si­tion of the Aven­ta Group, a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­ny in Cu­ra­cao and Aru­ba.

Mout­tet said the ac­qui­si­tion of Aven­ta marked a piv­otal step in the group’s growth strat­e­gy, ex­pand­ing its phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and health­care op­er­a­tions be­yond the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean.

“With this ad­di­tion, and with the ben­e­fits of the Health Brands ac­qui­si­tion in Ja­maica dur­ing the pre­vi­ous year, both of which are ac­cre­tive to earn­ings, the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and health­care busi­ness achieved healthy growth, with sales and prof­itabil­i­ty in­creas­ing by 16 per cent and 7 per cent re­spec­tive­ly,” said Mout­tet.

He out­lined that Agos­ti­ni’s con­sumer prod­ucts busi­ness, Caribbean Dis­tri­b­u­tion Part­ners, con­tin­ued to grow with sales ris­ing by five per cent and prof­its by six per cent.

The com­pa­ny’s en­er­gy and in­dus­tri­al busi­ness achieved sales in 2024 that were com­pa­ra­ble to 2023. The op­er­at­ing prof­it of the seg­ment im­proved by 15 per cent, said Mout­tet.

On the eve of the group’s 100 year an­niver­sary, the Agos­ti­ni’s chair­man said the com­pa­ny is pleased with the progress it has made in trans­form­ing it­self in re­cent years, “from an en­tire­ly T&T-based com­pa­ny in­to a re­gion­al group with op­er­a­tions across ten mar­kets.”

He said the group is con­fi­dent in its abil­i­ty to cap­i­talise on the re­gion­al growth op­por­tu­ni­ties avail­able to it.

He said while its re­cent re­gion­al ac­qui­si­tions have made the group more ge­o­graph­i­cal­ly di­ver­si­fied, T&T will re­main a sig­nif­i­cant and im­por­tant mar­ket, and one in which Agos­ti­ni’s will con­tin­ue to seek strate­gic growth op­por­tu­ni­ties.

“How­ev­er, the dif­fi­cul­ty in ob­tain­ing for­eign ex­change has be­come more acute in re­cent times. This re­quires us to ap­ply a bal­anced ap­proach to our in­vest­ment cri­te­ria, where we seek su­pe­ri­or share­hold­er re­turns as well as in­vest­ments that can scale re­gion­al­ly and gen­er­ate new for­eign ex­change rev­enue stream,” said Mout­tet, not­ing that the group is look­ing more crit­i­cal­ly at its ex­ist­ing op­er­a­tions, to en­sure that it is util­is­ing the for­eign ex­change avail­able to it ef­fi­cient­ly and prof­itably.