West In­di­an To­bac­co is the lat­est com­pa­ny to record a re­duc­tion in prof­it in 2020.

In its fi­nan­cial state­ment the Com­pa­ny re­port­ed it had record­ed Prof­it Be­fore Tax­a­tion of $588.1 mil­lion, for the year end­ed 31st De­cem­ber 2020.

This is a drop of $19.7 mil­lion or a 3.2 per cent de­crease com­pared to last year’s fig­ure.  Prof­it for the pe­ri­od is $410 mil­lion re­flect­ing a de­cline of $8.2 mil­lion or 2% over 2019.

In his Chair­man’s re­port,  An­tho­ny E Phillip said, “These re­sults re­flect the im­pact of COVID-19 on the busi­ness amidst a weak eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment cou­pled with in­crease in Ex­cise tax in 2020.”

The Wit­co chair­man al­so ex­pressed his con­cern about black mar­ket sales.
“Com­pe­ti­tion from the grow­ing list of sus­pect­ed il­lic­it trade and low-price of­fer­ings con­tin­ue to en­gage the in­dus­try, as a mat­ter of con­cern,” he said.

He how­ev­er praised the com­pa­ny’s re­silience  dur­ing the dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od.

“De­spite the re­stric­tive mea­sures of COVID-19 and the clo­sure of the Fac­to­ry for five weeks, the com­pa­ny was fast and ag­ile in adapt­ing to the new way of work. Our Route to Mar­ket process­es were amend­ed to re­flect the new re­al­i­ties en­sur­ing that our prod­ucts were avail­able to all our Cus­tomers on time and in full. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, cost sav­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties were re­al­ized by sim­pli­fy­ing key busi­ness process­es all the while en­sur­ing that 100% of our em­ploy­ees were re­tained,” he said.”