There was a five per cent in­crease in ANSA McAL’s Group Prof­it Be­fore Tax (PBT) for 2018 when com­pared to 2017. PBT in­creased to $1.017 bil­lion up from 2017’s $968 mil­lion.

This ac­cord­ing to the group’s Ex­ec­u­tive Chair­man, A Nor­man Sab­ga at the ANSA McAL’s Group’s 90th An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing held at the Radis­son Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain.

Sab­ga said rev­enues were up 2 per cent to $6.39 bil­lion com­pared to $6.24 bil­lion for 2017. The Earn­ings Per Share (EPS) im­proved by 12 per cent to $3.54 in 2018 when com­pared to 2017’s $3.15.

Ac­cord­ing to the Group’s re­port, the re­sults were im­pact­ed by gross claims of $20 mil­lion in its gen­er­al in­sur­ance com­pa­ny aris­ing from a mag­ni­tude 6.9 earth­quake and se­vere flood­ing in low ly­ing ar­eas in Trinidad in Oc­to­ber.

The re­port al­so stat­ed that there was $42 mil­lion in one time im­pair­ments aris­ing out of the Bar­ba­dos econ­o­my and debt re­struc­tur­ing by the Gov­ern­ment of Bar­ba­dos.

The short­age of for­eign ex­change in T&T’s mar­ket neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ty the Re­port al­so not­ed.

An­drew Sab­ga, Group Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer, who spoke dur­ing the AGM, said the Board ap­proved a div­i­dend in­crease in 2018 from $1.50 to 1.80 per share.

“This rep­re­sents a 20 per cent in­crease in div­i­dends and is one of the largest div­i­dend in­creas­es in cor­po­rate his­to­ry in T&T. That means that the Group would pay out $310 mil­lion or 43 per cent of prof­it Af­ter tax.”

Nor­man Sab­ga, Chair­man of the ANSA McAL Group, al­so said that de­spite the coun­try’s tough eco­nom­ic times of the last five years, the Group had per­formed well.

“The last five years have been fair­ly dif­fi­cult years in terms of prof­itabil­i­ty. We have been hold­ing and grow­ing our prof­its in low dig­its on an an­nu­al ba­sis, but we have been grow­ing them. Last year, our prof­it be­fore tax was 5 per cent and the div­i­dend has sig­nif­i­cant­ly gone up where we are pay­ing forty-some­thing per cent of our div­i­dend. I be­lieve go­ing for­ward, our per­for­mance in terms of earn­ings per share will im­prove and based on that, I be­lieve our share price will in­crease.”

Ac­cord­ing to the re­port, the Group sees sub­stan­tial growth po­ten­tial re­gion­al­ly for the au­to­mo­tive, bev­er­age, and fi­nan­cial ser­vices sec­tors and have al­ready be­gun ex­e­cut­ing their strate­gies to achieve this ob­jec­tive.

These di­verse in­vest­ments in­clude in­vest­ments in Tilawind SA Wind Farm in Cos­ta Ri­ca, the Group com­menced the process to ac­quire Trinidad Ag­gre­gate Prod­ucts Lim­it­ed, which was com­plet­ed in the first quar­ter of 2019 and Carib Glass­works be­gan pro­duc­tion of the One Litre Car­ta Blan­ca bot­tles to its newest client in Cu­ba.