KY­RON REG­IS

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

Agos­ti­ni’s Ltd has seen an in­crease of 5.4 per cent in rev­enue ($2.4 bil­lion in 2019 to $2.6 bil­lion in 2020) and a 0.5 per cent rise in net prof­it ($122.5 mil­lion in 2019 to $123.1 mil­lion in 2020) for the nine months end­ed June 30. The group’s op­er­at­ing prof­it al­so climbed by 9.9 per cent mov­ing from $179.9 mil­lion to $197.7 mil­lion.

In the com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial re­port for the pe­ri­od, chair­man Chris­t­ian Mout­tet ex­pressed that the on­ly de­crease was reg­is­tered in prof­its at­trib­ut­able to the share­hold­ers, which fell by one per cent to $89.7 mil­lion com­pared to $90.7 mil­lion in the same pe­ri­od in the pri­or year.

Mout­tet said: “Ex­clud­ing the ad­just­ment for the new IFRS stan­dard for leas­es, prof­it at­trib­uted to share­hold­ers would have been $92.5 mil­lion, an in­crease of two per cent over the pri­or year.”

He added that earn­ings per share was $1.30 ver­sus $1.31 in the pri­or year, not­ing that it would have been $1.33 be­fore the IFRS 16 im­pact.

Ac­cord­ing to Mout­tet, Agos­ti­ni’s “ex­pe­ri­enced a chal­leng­ing third quar­ter as our busi­ness­es and the mar­kets in which we op­er­ate ad­just­ed to the ef­fects of the COVID-19 virus.”

He dis­closed that in the first half of the year, Agos­ti­ni’s phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal busi­ness­es per­formed well, as did its fast mov­ing con­sumer goods (FM­CG) busi­ness­es in Trinidad, St Vin­cent and Guyana.

How­ev­er, in the more tourism-de­pen­dent mar­kets of Bar­ba­dos, St Lu­cia and Grena­da, Mout­tet high­light­ed that the com­pa­ny’s FM­CG busi­ness­es ex­pe­ri­enced re­duced sales and prof­itabil­i­ty.

In like man­ner, Mout­tet re­vealed that the group’s en­er­gy ser­vices and con­struc­tion busi­ness­es per­formed be­low ex­pec­ta­tions as those in­dus­tries con­tin­ue to strug­gle in a weak macro-eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment and from low en­er­gy prices.

“Over­all, our group has per­formed rea­son­ably well for the first nine months, tak­ing in­to ac­count the im­pact the pan­dem­ic has had on many in­dus­tries and economies.”

He ex­plained that across all of the group’s com­pa­nies, Agos­ti­ni’s has tak­en the op­por­tu­ni­ty to car­ry out an in-depth re­view of all of its op­er­a­tions and busi­ness struc­tures so that it can adapt to and thrive in the very dy­nam­ic busi­ness land­scape it is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing.

Mout­tet con­tend­ed that giv­en the un­cer­tain­ty brought about by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, it is dif­fi­cult to make for­ward-look­ing state­ments with any lev­el of cer­tain­ty.

He not­ed, how­ev­er, as­sum­ing no ad­di­tion­al sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic dis­rup­tions, Agos­ti­ni’s ex­pects re­sults for the full year broad­ly in line with the pre­vi­ous year.