Ma­jor­i­ty state-owned Na­tion­al Flour Mills (NFM) has an­nounced an af­ter-tax prof­it of $20.5 mil­lion for the first half of 2024, a 29 per cent in­crease over the same pe­ri­od in 2023.

NFM chair­man Nigel Ro­mano, in his re­port for the pe­ri­od end­ed June 30, 2024, said while the com­pa­ny's over­all vol­umes in­creased by more than 5 per cent year-on-year, rev­enue de­clined by 12 per cent dri­ven by sig­nif­i­cant de­creas­es in prices of grain which the com­pa­ny passed on the cus­tomers.

Ro­mano said, "Pru­dent man­age­ment of grain pur­chas­es, helped by sta­bil­i­ty in grain mar­kets, led to an in­crease in our gross prof­it mar­gins; and low­er sales and fi­nance costs paved the way for an in­crease in our net prof­it mar­gin from 5.5 per cent in the first half of 2023 to 8.1 per cent this year. In ad­di­tion to pass­ing on some of the sav­ings achieved to our cus­tomers we con­tin­ued to sharp­en the saw, in­vest­ing in up­grades to our plant and ma­chin­ery."

Ro­mano was al­so pleased to re­port that NFM's 2kg pack­ag­ing line was in­stalled and com­mis­sioned.

He said, "This new line will im­prove not on­ly the qual­i­ty of our prod­ucts but al­so our pro­duc­tion ef­fi­cien­cy. Planned up­grades to our pack­ag­ing lines for the next three quar­ters will al­so in­crease ef­fi­cien­cy while al­low­ing us to in­tro­duce new, ex­cit­ing prod­uct of­fer­ings. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, we will be­gin tran­si­tion­ing some of our ex­ist­ing prod­ucts to more mod­ern, con­sumer-friend­ly pack­ag­ing."

He added, "The abil­i­ty to de­liv­er on time and in full re­mains an im­por­tant met­ric for us and in an ef­fort to pro­vide bet­ter ser­vice to our cus­tomers in Cen­tral and South Trinidad, we launched the dis­tri­b­u­tion of food prod­ucts from our lo­ca­tion in Cen­tral Trinidad.In­formed by on­go­ing feed­back from our cus­tomer sur­veys, we will con­tin­ue to im­prove the qual­i­ty of our prod­ucts and ser­vices."