State-con­trolled Na­tion­al Flour Mills (NFM) is on a con­tin­ued path of growth and ex­pan­sion in 2025.

The com­pa­ny will be seek­ing new op­por­tu­ni­ties in the Cari­com mar­ket and be­yond and plans to make fur­ther in­vest­ments in plant and ma­chin­ery, the com­pa­ny’s CEO Ian Mitchell told the Busi­ness Guardian in an in­ter­view.

Not­ing that the NFM con­tin­ues to be the lead­ing flour and dry mixed prod­ucts provider in T&T, Mitchell said,” But tremen­dous op­por­tu­ni­ties ex­ist with­in Cari­com. We in­tend to cap­i­talise on these op­por­tu­ni­ties. We al­so have plans to con­tin­ue of­fer­ing ex­cit­ing new prod­ucts that will fu­el growth in the food, an­i­mal feed, and pet food cat­e­gories.”

NFM en­tered new ter­ri­to­ries in 2024, in­clud­ing An­guil­la, Do­mini­ca, Bonaire, and the Ba­hamas.

Af­ter a suc­cess­ful Trinidad and To­ba­go Man­u­fac­tur­ers As­so­ci­a­tion mis­sion in March 2024, the com­pa­ny al­so be­gan ex­tra-re­gion­al ex­ports of pet food to Ghana.

Mitchell re­in­forced that the NFM in­tends to con­tin­ue this trend in 2025 and is al­ready tar­get­ing an­oth­er im­por­tant Cari­com mar­ket in Jan­u­ary 2025.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, lo­cal con­sumers are not to be left out.

Mitchell de­tailed that sev­er­al in­no­va­tion high­lights are planned for 2025.

“Our con­sumers will start see­ing some new, ex­cit­ing of­fer­ings as ear­ly as Q1 of 2025 (by the end of March). Look out for in­no­va­tion in the dry mix­es cat­e­go­ry,” he said .

Dry mix­es are in­tend­ed to of­fer con­ve­nience to the busy con­sumer.

Crit­i­cal to these goals will be fur­ther strength­en­ing of NFM’s plant and ma­chin­ery to en­sure op­ti­mal pro­duc­tion ca­pa­bil­i­ty.

In this vein, Mitchell ex­plained, “The NFM is on a path of ag­gres­sive in­no­va­tion and growth. A crit­i­cal as­pect of this is mod­ernising our plant and equip­ment to en­sure we can pro­vide our cus­tomers with prod­ucts that meet the high­est food qual­i­ty and safe­ty stan­dards. We al­so need to be more re­spon­sive to con­sumers’ chang­ing needs. With this in mind, some fur­ther in­vest­ments are planned for the next two years.”

The NFM is ex­plor­ing link­ages with In­dia in the area of rice pro­duc­tion.

Last year, Mitchell vis­it­ed the south­ern part of the Asian con­ti­nent, dur­ing which dis­cus­sions took place with a num­ber of in­sti­tu­tions dis­cussing pos­si­bil­i­ties re­lat­ing to rice pro­duc­tion in Trinidad.

Mitchell al­so looked at NFM’s per­for­mance in 2024, stat­ing the com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial per­for­mance for the nine months to Sep­tem­ber 2024 was ro­bust, with strong im­prove­ments in prof­itabil­i­ty and bet­ter cost man­age­ment when com­pared to 2023.

“We were able to gen­er­ate high­er gross and net prof­its de­spite de­clin­ing rev­enue, which is com­mend­able. Sus­tain­ing rev­enue growth while main­tain­ing cost ef­fi­cien­cies will be the fo­cus go­ing for­ward. The com­pa­ny is on a stronger fi­nan­cial foot­ing, dri­ven by favourable mar­ket con­di­tions for raw ma­te­ri­als and dis­ci­plined fi­nan­cial man­age­ment,” he said.

In shar­ing some sta­tis­tics re­gard­ing the NFM’s per­for­mance Mitchell stat­ed:

Bet­ter for the nine months to Sep­tem­ber 2024:

• Prof­itabil­i­ty: Net prof­it in­creased by 47.7 per cent;

• Cost man­age­ment: Cost of sales re­duced by 15.8 per cent;

• Fi­nance costs: De­creased sig­nif­i­cant­ly by 83.0 per cen;

• Rev­enue: De­creased by 10.5 per cent, pri­mar­i­ly due to price sav­ings passed on to feed and re­tail flour cus­tomers; and

• In­creased in­vest­ment spend­ing: High­er cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture of $31.5 mil­lion for the nine months to Sep­tem­ber 2024 com­pared to $6.5 mil­lion in 2023.

The NFM’s unau­dit­ed re­sults for the nine months to Sep­tem­ber 30, 2024 showed that the com­pa­ny con­tin­ued its strong per­for­mance record­ing a prof­it of $38.3 mil­lion as com­pared to $26 mil­lion for the com­par­a­tive pe­ri­od in 2023 and $35.4 mil­lion for its fi­nan­cial year end­ing De­cem­ber 31, 2023

NFM chair­man Ash­meer Mo­hamed in his state­ment said while rev­enue de­clined 10 per cent year-on-year from $431 mil­lion in 2023 to $386 mil­lion in 2024, the cost of sales de­clined by 15.8 per cent to $270 mil­lion in 2024, from $320 mil­lion for the com­par­a­tive pe­ri­od in 2023.

He not­ed this was at­trib­ut­able to favourable grain prices and pru­dent grain pur­chas­ing.

The sta­bil­i­ty of ex­pens­es and a sig­nif­i­cant de­crease in fi­nance costs were al­so con­trib­u­to­ry fac­tors.

Com­pared to its unau­dit­ed re­sults as at Sep­tem­ber 30, 2023, then chair­man Nigel Ro­mano not­ed that for the first three quar­ters of 2023 the com­pa­ny earned rev­enue of $431 mil­lion, a 16 per cent in­crease over the com­par­a­tive pe­ri­od in 2022.

He said gross prof­it al­so in­creased from $59 mil­lion in 2022 to $110 mil­lion in 2023, yield­ing a gross prof­it per­cent­age of 25 per cent, more in line with in­ter­na­tion­al bench­marks for busi­ness­es in­volved in the man­u­fac­ture and mar­ket­ing of flour and feed prod­ucts.

“We earned a prof­it af­ter tax of $26 mil­lion, an in­crease of six per cent, which is al­so ac­cept­able, but we still have work to do,” Ro­mano had al­so stat­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to the stock­brok­age com­pa­ny WISE, (West In­dies Stock­bro­kers Ltd) the NFM’s stock was down 12.37 per cent for 2024 up to De­cem­ber 27, 2024.

Re­gard­ing in­vest­ments in plant and ma­chin­ery for 2024, Mitchell out­lined these were in pack­ag­ing equip­ment in the food di­vi­sion of the busi­ness.

“You will ob­serve that there has been a move to in­tro­duce more sus­tain­able and con­sumer-friend­ly pack­ag­ing. In all cas­es where up­grades are ef­fect­ed, we de­sign the new lines to im­prove per­for­mance and over­all ef­fi­cien­cy. This means we re­duced labour in­ten­si­ty and in­creased line out­put speeds to re­duce the risk of in­jury to em­ploy­ees while im­prov­ing line ca­pac­i­ty. These ul­ti­mate­ly re­sult­ed in a re­duc­tion in man­u­fac­tur­ing costs,” he said.

The NFM was not with­out chal­lenges in 2024.

The most sig­nif­i­cant were:

• Ship­ping dis­rup­tions: De­lays and in­creased costs re­sult­ing from glob­al lo­gis­tics chal­lenges, par­tic­u­lar­ly from sup­pli­ers in East Asia and South Amer­i­ca, af­fect­ed the busi­ness quite sig­nif­i­cant­ly. These led to stock out­ages and re­duced mar­gins from prod­ucts in our trad­ed goods cat­e­go­ry.

• In­flux of cheap im­port­ed flour, main­ly from Turkey, con­tin­ues to pose sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges to lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers like NFM.

Mitchell not­ed that Turkey is known for its high­ly sub­sidised agri­cul­tur­al and milling sec­tors, which en­able its pro­duc­ers to ex­port flour at ex­treme­ly low prices to less de­vel­oped coun­tries like T&T and the oth­er Cari­com ju­ris­dic­tions. Guyana re­cent­ly ap­plied to Cari­com for an in­crease in the Com­mon Ex­ter­nal Tar­iff (CET) for ex­tra-re­gion­al flour prod­ucts.

NFM’s largest share­hold­ers

Name*Share­hold­ings*Per­cent­age

Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Ltd*61,301,998*51.00%

R.J In­vest­ments*9,291,020*7.73%

MASA In­vest­ments*6,777,911*5.54%

Cli­co (Trinidad) Ltd*4,521,379*3.76%