Al­most a month af­ter a bit­ter and some­times vi­o­lent le­gal 90-day strike end­ed at the cash-strapped Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd (TCL), its Group chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Dr Rollin Bertrand said TCL has com­plet­ed the re­pro­fil­ing of most of its out­stand­ing debt. In a no­tice pub­lished on Fri­day, TCL stat­ed: "The re­pro­fil­ing plan ex­tends the ma­tu­ri­ties of ap­prox­i­mate­ly $1.95 bil­lion in se­cured and un­se­cured oblig­a­tions with more than 30 re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions and bond­hold­ers, pro­vid­ing for a quar­ter­ly amor­ti­sa­tion sched­ule start­ing March 30, 3013, with a fi­nal ma­tu­ri­ty of De­cem­ber 30, 2018."

The Clax­ton Bay-based com­pa­ny said it in­tends to meet the amor­ti­sa­tion re­quire­ments pri­or to fi­nal ma­tu­ri­ty us­ing funds from "a va­ri­ety of sources, in­clud­ing free cash­flow from op­er­a­tions and net cash pro­ceeds from strate­gic ini­tia­tives, as well as cap­i­tal mar­ket trans­ac­tions." No oth­er de­tails were of­fered re­gard­ing the sources of funds or the strate­gic ini­tia­tives men­tioned.

TCL, which the Oil­field Work­ers' Trade Union served strike no­tice on Feb­ru­ary 27 af­ter re­fus­ing its 6.5 per cent wage in­crease of­fer, in April ap­plied to the T&T Stock Ex­change (TTSE) for a two-week ex­ten­sion on the 90-day time lim­it re­quired by the TTSE's list­ing rules for sub­mis­sion of the au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments of TCL and Readymix (West In­dies) Ltd for the year end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2011.

How­ev­er, TCL's con­sol­i­dat­ed in­ter­im fi­nan­cial re­port for the three months end­ed March 31, 2012, stat­ed: "Rev­enue for Q1 2012 was low­er by $13.5 mil­lion than in 2011 due main­ly to low­er ce­ment sales vol­umes from the Trinidad plant to both do­mes­tic and ex­port mar­kets as a con­se­quence of a gen­er­al strike by work­ers...." "Av­er­age ce­ment sell­ing price was 9 per cent high­er than in Q1 2011 as the Group had ad­just­ed its sell­ing prices in De­cem­ber 2011.

Notwith­stand­ing the im­prove­ment in pric­ing, earn­ings be­fore in­ter­est, tax­es, de­pre­ci­a­tion and amor­ti­sa­tion (ebit­da) de­clined from $35 mil­lion to $12.4 mil­lion due to the 23 per cent low­er pro­duc­tion of clink­er as the plants in Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos ex­pe­ri­enced op­er­at­ing chal­lenges due to a lack of spares aris­ing from in­ad­e­quate work­ing cap­i­tal fol­low­ing the ef­fec­tive with­draw­al of cred­it fa­cil­i­ties un­der the debt re­struc­tur­ing and, in Trinidad, due to the strike.

"Fi­nance cost amount­ed to $51.3 mil­lion com­pared with $40.5 mil­lion due to the ad­di­tion­al two per cent mar­gin be­ing record­ed in ac­cor­dance with the terms of the debt re­struc­tur­ing. "The debt re­struc­tur­ing agree­ments were ex­e­cut­ed by the Group on May 10. Fur­ther debt re­struc­tur­ing ex­pens­es of $8 mil­lion were in­curred in the quar­ter. Le­gal and ad­vi­so­ry fees re­lat­ing to this ex­er­cise, which would have been paid up to the clos­ing on May 10, amount­ed to $49.1 mil­lion, which fur­ther com­pro­mised the Group's work­ing cap­i­tal.

"As a con­se­quence of the ex­e­cu­tion of the debt re­struc­tur­ing agree­ments, $1,890 mil­lion of debt oblig­a­tions now in­clud­ed as cur­rent li­a­bil­i­ties will be re­clas­si­fied in­to long-term li­a­bil­i­ties as a re­sult of which cur­rent net as­sets will be­come a pos­i­tive $258 mil­lion."