Clax­ton Bay-head­quar­tered Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd yes­ter­day de­clared prof­it af­ter tax of $103 mil­lion for the first six months of 2023, a de­crease of 8 per cent when com­pared to the same pe­ri­od in 2022.

In the pe­ri­od be­tween Jan­u­ary 1 and June 30, 2023, the group record­ed con­sol­i­dat­ed rev­enue from con­tin­u­ing op­er­a­tions of $1.1 bil­lion, 8 per cent high­er than 2022.

The Group’s ad­just­ed EBIT­DA (Earn­ings Be­fore In­ter­est, Tax­a­tion, De­pre­ci­a­tion and Amor­ti­sa­tion) for the first six months of 2023 was $245 mil­lion, an 11 per cent de­crease com­pared to the pri­or year due to low­er op­er­at­ing re­sults in Ja­maica.

Ce­ment sales vol­umes in­creased by 4 per cent and 5 per cent in Trinidad and To­ba­go and Ja­maica, re­spec­tive­ly, and the vol­ume of ex­port­ed ce­ment in­creased by 5 per cent when com­pared to the first quar­ter.

The TCL group record­ed con­sol­i­dat­ed rev­enue from con­tin­u­ing op­er­a­tions of $595 mil­lion dur­ing the sec­ond quar­ter of 2023, an in­crease of 11 per cent when com­pared to the sec­ond quar­ter of 2022.

The group’s ad­just­ed EBIT­DA of $186 mil­lion in the sec­ond quar­ter re­flect­ed an in­crease of 39 per cent com­pared to the same pe­ri­od of the pre­vi­ous year.

This re­sult re­flects the im­pact of high­er sales vol­umes across the Group. In the sec­ond quar­ter of 2023, the TCL Group re­port­ed a net in­come of $105 mil­lion com­pared to $54 mil­lion dur­ing the same pe­ri­od in 2022.

This in­crease of 93 per cent was dri­ven by in­creased ce­ment vol­umes in T&T and Guyana the pos­i­tive im­pact of price in­creas­es im­ple­ment­ed to con­tain cost in­fla­tion and im­proved op­er­at­ing re­sults in Bar­ba­dos un­der the new op­er­at­ing mod­el.

In ad­dress­ing TCL’s out­look for the rest of 2023, TCL di­rec­tors, chair­man David In­gle­field and man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Fran­cis­co Men­doza, said: “De­spite in­fla­tion, our mar­kets con­tin­ue to show strong ce­ment vol­umes, in par­tic­u­lar Guyana with an in­crease of 30 per cent in ce­ment vol­umes be­tween June 2022 and June 2023.

“We con­tin­ue to ex­e­cute rel­e­vant ini­tia­tives to in­crease the val­ue of­fer­ing to our cus­tomers, which in­cludes the up­com­ing in­tro­duc­tion of our ser­vice cen­tres, the de­ploy­ment of Con­stru­ra­ma with sev­en stores al­ready opened since its launch in Sep­tem­ber 2022 and four oth­ers in line and an in­crease in our pa­per­less ini­tia­tives by mi­grat­ing our cus­tomers to elec­tron­ic in­voic­ing and dis­patch tick­et­ing.

“While in­spired by the re­silience of our mar­kets, the board and man­age­ment re­main at­ten­tive to the loom­ing threat of eco­nom­ic and so­cial is­sues out­side of their con­trol and con­tin­ue to con­sid­er risk buffer­ing and avoid­ance among oth­er core strate­gies.

“Over­all, we are en­cour­aged by the po­ten­tial for a sat­is­fac­to­ry per­for­mance in 2023.”