Sto­ries by KY­RON REG­IS

ky­ron.reg­is@guardian.co.tt

Al­though the two com­pa­nies, the West In­di­an To­bac­co Com­pa­ny (Wit­co) and Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd (TCL) re­ceived spe­cial ex­emp­tions from the Gov­ern­ment to re­sume op­er­a­tions, ear­ly dur­ing the “stay-at-home” pe­ri­od of the cur­rent pan­dem­ic, their fi­nan­cial re­sults were strik­ing­ly dis­sim­i­lar.

For the six months end­ed June 30, 2020, Wit­co’s net prof­it of $194 mil­lion rep­re­sent­ed a $16.14 mil­lion or 7.68 per cent de­cline, while TCL’s net prof­it of $10.4 mil­lion showed a $22.95 mil­lion or 68.74 per cent de­crease.

In the di­rec­tors re­port for TCL, Chair­man David In­gle­field and Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor Jose Sei­jo Gon­za­les said the ar­rival of COVID-19 adds to the chal­lenges of the busi­ness that ex­ist­ed pri­or to the start of the pan­dem­ic in the re­gion.

They con­tin­ued: “These in­clude weak eco­nom­ic growth in many of our lo­cal economies over the last few years and im­ports of ce­ment in­to the re­gion.”

Mean­while, in his re­port, Wit­co Chair­man An­tho­ny E Phillip said that the com­pa­ny’s fac­to­ry op­er­a­tions were closed for the month of April and this neg­a­tive­ly im­pact­ed ex­ports to Ja­maica, Guyana and oth­er Caribbean is­lands.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, he said that the dis­tri­b­u­tion of prod­ucts in the do­mes­tic mar­ket was se­vere­ly dis­rupt­ed by the “stay-at-home” mea­sures and the clo­sure of the en­ter­tain­ment chan­nels.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, Phillip ex­plained: “We had a con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tion to the oth­er mar­kets and if Wit­co did not re­sume op­er­a­tions to sup­ply the con­tract­ed mar­kets, Wit­co would have had to pur­chase cig­a­rettes from oth­er sources with the same brand names and every­thing and send it to them.”

He likened it to taxi op­er­a­tor who has a con­tract with a client to take them to the air­port.

Phillip not­ed that if the time for trans­port­ing the client aris­es and the taxi is not func­tion­al, the op­er­a­tor has to or­gan­ise an­oth­er taxi to take the client to the air­port.

Wit­co’s chair­man said this would have hap­pened to the com­pa­ny had it been shut down for an ex­tend­ed pe­ri­od of time.

He said: “Be­cause there is no oth­er fac­to­ry in­side of Cari­com it means that that man­u­fac­tur­er would have come from out­side of Cari­com to sup­ply those mar­kets.”

More­over, Phillip said Wit­co would have been in breach of con­tract with the busi­ness­es with which they had part­nered to keep them stocked. He said: “The im­pli­ca­tions are, that if their busi­ness­es shut down, they could have sued Wit­co.”

Based on the sup­ply con­tract with Wit­co, Phillip said that these oth­er busi­ness­es had shut down their fac­to­ries. Phillip al­so not­ed that when Wit­co re­sumed sup­ply to these mar­kets, the stock lev­els of these busi­ness­es were very low be­cause even dur­ing the var­i­ous “stay-at-home” pe­ri­ods in dif­fer­ent coun­tries, stores con­tin­ued to sell cig­a­rettes.

In his re­port, Phillip said with the phased re­open­ing of busi­ness­es there were pos­i­tive changes to mar­ket process­es, which should con­tin­ue to dri­ve ef­fi­cien­cies and en­sure its prod­ucts are avail­able to all cus­tomers.