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Wednesday, May 7, 2025

UTC loses $33 million, first time in five years

by

Raphael John Lall
2171 days ago
20190527
UTC Shareholders, Bernice Teleford, left, and Idris Williams, right, chat with Unit Trust Corporation (UTC) Chairman Rolston Nelson and Executive Director Nigel Edwards during UTC’s 37th Annual General Meeting held at NAPA, on Monday.

UTC Shareholders, Bernice Teleford, left, and Idris Williams, right, chat with Unit Trust Corporation (UTC) Chairman Rolston Nelson and Executive Director Nigel Edwards during UTC’s 37th Annual General Meeting held at NAPA, on Monday.

SHIRLEY BAHADUR

The Unit Trust Cor­po­ra­tion (UTC) Group made a loss of $33 mil­lion in 2018 ac­cord­ing to its Ex­ec­u­tive Di­rec­tor Nigel Ed­wards. The Cor­po­ra­tion is re­port­ing a TT$293 mil­lion de­cline in to­tal in­come last year when com­pared to 2017.

This is the since the UTC group start­ed prepar­ing con­sol­i­dat­ed fi­nan­cial re­port it has record­ed a loss.

Ed­wards told Guardian Me­dia that the re­ver­sal of $88 mil­lion when com­pared to 2017 was main­ly as a re­sult of the new ac­count­ing stan­dards that the cor­po­ra­tion had to adopt.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view with GML, Ed­wards said al­ready the com­pa­ny was see­ing pos­i­tive move­ments in its net po­si­tion in 2019 with a change in the fair val­ue of $ 288.7 mil­lion.

In its an­nu­al re­port, the UTC’s Chief Fi­nan­cial Of­fi­cer’s in­di­cat­ed that to­tal in­come de­clined from 996 mil­lion in 2017 to 772 mil­lion in 2018. The prin­ci­pal dri­ver of this was un­favourable move­ments in the fair val­ue of in­vest­ments se­cu­ri­ties amount­ing to TT$456 mil­lion in 2018.

There was a re­duc­tion of TT$224 mil­lion in re­alised cap­i­tal gains due to the re­bal­anc­ing of the in­vest­ment port­fo­lio for the Growth and In­come Fund and the Uni­ver­sal Re­tire­ment Fund.

The Re­port al­so said that the Group’s fo­cus on en­hanc­ing unithold­ers’ wealth and pro­vid­ing com­pet­i­tive re­turns led to in­creased dis­tri­b­u­tion pay­ments of TT$52 mil­lion and to­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion to unithold­ers was TT$249.3 mil­lion.

De­spite these chal­lenges in 2018, the re­port said for the first time in its his­to­ry the Growth and In­come Fund crossed the $5 bil­lion mark.

Speak­ing on Mon­day at the An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing, Ed­wards told unithold­ers that as at April 30, 2019 the UTC had in its Growth and In­come Fund TT$5.2 bil­lion un­der man­age­ment.

“The suc­cess of the Growth and In­come Fund sur­passed our ex­pec­ta­tions. Many peo­ple in T&T are now so­phis­ti­cat­ed, re­spon­si­ble in­vestors and as such, the UTC con­tin­ues to look for new ways that are aligned to the in­dus­try’s best prac­tice to bring you val­ue.”

Oth­er key per­for­mance in­di­ca­tors that he point­ed out in­clude growth in as­sets to $22 bil­lion, a growth in cus­tomer base by 1.3 per­cent, cash flow gen­er­a­tion of $514 mil­lion and favourable re­turns in mu­tu­al fund port­fo­lios with the TT Dol­lar In­come Fund cross­ing the $11 bil­lion mark for the first time in its his­to­ry.

He said the re­cent ap­pli­ca­tion by the Caribbean In­for­ma­tion and Cred­it Rat­ing Ser­vices Lim­it­ed (Cari­CRIS) of a “high” cred­it rat­ing val­i­dates that the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion is on the right path.

He al­so re­ferred to the lim­it­ed avail­abil­i­ty of for­eign cur­ren­cy in the coun­try.

“Un­like the com­mer­cial banks, the UTC is not a pri­ma­ry deal­er of for­eign ex­change and as such we are not in re­ceipt of an al­lo­ca­tion from the Cen­tral Bank. Our sup­ply of US dol­lars is de­pen­dent on what we pur­chase from cus­tomers and what is bought from oth­er fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions. The for­eign ex­change mar­ket is ex­treme­ly re­strict­ed, so we will en­sure that many of our unithold­ers have ac­cess to the lim­it­ed funds avail­able. Cus­tomers in the US In­come Fund can ac­cess their funds via their visa card, wire trans­fer or cheque,” he said.


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