The ANSA McAL Group of com­pa­nies has re­turned to pre-pan­dem­ic prof­itabil­i­ty lev­els notwith­stand­ing the en­dur­ing COVID-19 and re­stric­tions and clo­sures, the con­glom­er­ate’s chair­man A Nor­man Sab­ga has said.

Ansa McAL has record­ed a prof­it be­fore tax of $935 mil­lion for the year end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2021.

This was a 29 per cent in­crease when com­pared to the same pe­ri­od in 2020.

The group’s rev­enue al­so in­creased last year by $50 mil­lion to $5.97 bil­lion.

Its Earn­ings per share was up by 40 per cent to $3.45 and to­tal as­sets grew by 11 per cent to $17.461 bil­lion.

And its gear­ing ra­tio re­duced and re­mains healthy at 9.1 per cent.

But the con­glom­er­ate did not achieve this by luck or chance ANSA McAL’s Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer An­tho­ny N Sab­ga III has said.

“It is from dili­gent man­age­ment and pru­dent guid­ance of the busi­ness by our lead­er­ship teams we were able to pro­duce what we were able to pro­duce a gen­uine tes­ta­ment to our con­tin­ued re­silience and strength and pow­er of our or­gan­i­sa­tion­al ca­pa­bil­i­ty,” CEO Sab­ga said in a vir­tu­al stock­hold­ers’ meet­ing yes­ter­day

And be­cause of this chair­man Sab­ga said he be­lieves that this year is go­ing to be much bet­ter than last year.

“I have no doubt that 2022 is go­ing to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter with the open­ing of the mar­ket,” chair­man Sab­ga said dur­ing the stock­hold­ers’ meet­ing.

“Most seg­ments showed an in­crease in prof­it led by Fi­nan­cial Ser­vices where there was an over­all in­crease in in­vest­ment re­turns. Our Dis­tri­b­u­tion busi­ness strength­ened its cus­tomer man­age­ment mod­el and ben­e­fit­ed from high de­mand for food and clean­ing prod­ucts. Our Bev­er­age sec­tor had a strong per­for­mance in Q4 due to the lift­ing of some COVID-19 re­stric­tions. These re­sults are a tes­ti­mo­ny to the re­silience of the Group even when faced with these unique chal­lenges,” chair­man Sab­ga stat­ed.

“Look­ing ahead, the launch of ANSA Bank’s ful­ly dig­i­tal op­er­a­tions is on sched­ule for Q3 2022 and will of­fer a rad­i­cal­ly en­hanced cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence. The ac­qui­si­tion of Colfire In­sur­ance is un­der­way sub­ject to reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals and will sig­nif­i­cant­ly bol­ster our in­sur­ance busi­ness. We al­so con­tin­ue to fo­cus on grow­ing ex­ports to im­prove for­eign ex­change flows. We con­tin­ue to man­age an ex­pand­ing cor­po­rate busi­ness de­vel­op­ment and in­no­va­tion pipeline with a view to cre­at­ing in­creased eco­nom­ic val­ue,” chair­man Sab­ga stat­ed.

CEO Sab­ga said apart from the fan­tas­tic fi­nan­cial re­sults that were gen­er­at­ed, there is even one more achieve­ment that he is proud of.

“These re­sults were gen­er­at­ed with­out any pan­dem­ic re­lat­ed job loss­es,” CEO Sab­ga stat­ed.

The Group’s Chief Fi­nan­cial Of­fi­cer Nicholas Jack­man said what the con­glom­er­ate is do­ing is build­ing the mo­men­tum to de­liv­er val­ue for the long term.

Chair­man Sab­ga said as the group grows it is al­so keen­ly aware of the need to be even more re­spon­si­ble in the way it con­ducts busi­ness.

In 2021, the group set its sus­tain­abil­i­ty busi­ness pri­or­i­ties for the fu­ture which are aligned to the UN Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Goals us­ing an En­vi­ron­men­tal, So­cial and Gov­er­nance lens.

The key ar­eas of fo­cus for the group will be wa­ter preser­va­tion, waste re­duc­tion, cli­mate im­pact, mod­ern en­er­gy, peo­ple and com­mu­ni­ties and cor­po­rate gov­er­nance.

Chair­man Sab­ga said in line with the group’s mod­ern en­er­gy agen­da, it is in­creas­ing its re­new­able en­er­gy port­fo­lio to 90-100mw through an in­vest­ment in the Monte Pla­ta So­lar Park in the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic.

The Board ap­proved a fi­nal div­i­dend of $1.50 per share.

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