KY­RON REG­IS

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

The Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Port De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion Ltd (PLIPDE­CO) has record­ed $75.3 mil­lion dol­lar prof­it af­ter tax for nine months end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2020.

This rep­re­sents a 26 per cent de­cline in prof­its when com­pared to the pre­vi­ous pe­ri­od’s $101.4 mil­lion.

In the com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial state­ments, com­pa­ny Chair­man Ian Ather­ly not­ed: “As we con­tin­ue in­to the new nor­mal brought about by the glob­al pan­dem­ic, the Cor­po­ra­tion re­mained com­mit­ted to con­tribut­ing to the re­cov­ery of T&T by gen­er­at­ing pos­i­tive re­sults.”

Af­ter the end of the first three pe­ri­ods PLIPDE­CO gen­er­at­ed a Group Prof­it be­fore tax, ex­clu­sive of Fair Val­ue Gains on the ten­ant­ed premis­es, of $20.7 mil­lion in 2020 as com­pared to $28.6 mil­lion in 2019.

The Fair Val­ue Gains of $62 mil­lion in 2020 (2019: $82 mil­lion) re­sult­ed from in­creas­es in fair val­ue of in­vest­ment prop­er­ties on the In­dus­tri­al Es­tate due to rent re­views and re­newals dur­ing the three quar­ters of 2020.

The com­pa­ny’s Earn­ings per Share (EPS) stood at $1.91 ($2.56: 2019) while Earn­ings Be­fore In­ter­est, Tax­es, De­pre­ci­a­tion and Amor­ti­za­tion (EBIT­DA) stood at $48.9 mil­lion (2019: $57.4 mil­lion).

Group Rev­enue gen­er­at­ed for the three quar­ters of 2020, amount­ed to $228.2 mil­lion (a de­crease of $3.4 mil­lion or one per cent).

Ather­ly said: “The re­duc­tion in rev­enue is a re­sult of a de­crease in car­go through­out at the Port as well as a re­duc­tion in retroac­tive lease re­newals.”

He added: “The de­crease in car­go through­put was at­trib­uted to a one per cent re­duc­tion in con­tainer­ised car­go and a 17 per cent re­duc­tion in gen­er­al car­go ton­nage when com­pared to 2019.”

Ather­ly ex­pressed that as PLIPECO ap­proach­es the end of 2020, the Cor­po­ra­tion would con­tin­ue to mon­i­tor the eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment and the im­pact that it may have on its op­er­a­tions, “while mak­ing the nec­es­sary ad­just­ments from process and fis­cal per­spec­tives.”