?BRIDGETOWN–Two years af­ter ac­quir­ing Bar­ba­dos Ship­ping & Trad­ing Ltd (BS&T) in a pro­tract­ed share­hold­er bat­tle, the Trinidad-based con­glom­er­ate Neal & Massy is con­sid­er­ing sell­ing off some of its as­sets.

This pos­si­bil­i­ty has been high­light­ed in a com­pa­ny re­view on Neal & Massy is­sued this week by the Bar­ba­dos-based Sig­nia Fi­nan­cial Group. In the re­view, Sig­nia notes that Neal & Massy "plans to re­view some of its non-per­form­ing as­sets and in­vest­ments for di­vest­ment; par­tic­u­lar­ly some of the non-per­form­ing busi­ness­es in­her­it­ed from the ac­qui­si­tion of the BS&T Group." This de­ci­sion is re­port­ed­ly part of the T&T con­glom­er­ate's re­sponse to "these chal­leng­ing times," which al­so in­cludes plans by man­age­ment to "the rigour of cost ef­fi­cien­cy, work­ing cap­i­tal man­age­ment and con­trol­ling of risks."

While Neal & Massy chair­man Arthur Lok Jack has de­scribed the group's per­for­mance over the first quar­ter end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2009, as "strong," blame was at­trib­uted to the "cur­rent eco­nom­ic chal­lenges" were re­spon­si­ble for the con­glom­er­ate tak­ing a $168.99 mil­lion hit to its rev­enue line, re­sult­ing in a 7.27 per cent de­cline to just over $2.1 bil­lion.

Hard-hit sec­tors

While the en­er­gy and in­dus­tri­al gas­es, and the fi­nance and prop­er­ty busi­ness units per­formed rea­son­ably well, the au­to­mo­tive, con­struc­tion-re­lat­ed and food re­tail­ing busi­ness­es were ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed by the con­di­tions. How­ev­er, per­for­mances by its as­so­ci­at­ed com­pa­nies and joint ven­tures did im­prove lead­ing to a whop­ping 74.83 per cent in share of re­sults to $10.50 mil­lion. A strong re­ver­sal of for­tunes over the re­sults for the 2009 fi­nan­cial year that end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, 2009, which saw Neal & Massy's share of prof­its from as­so­ci­at­ed com­pa­nies freefall by 77.99 per cent to $16.17 mil­lion.

Prof­it af­ter tax for the first quar­ter of the 2010 fi­nan­cial year on­ly in­creased by a mod­est 0.65 per cent, to $118.32 mil­lion, while earn­ings per share in­creased by 4 cents (3.45 per cent), to $1.20. The Group's to­tal as­sets grew to $8.418 bil­lion–a $124 mil­lion in­crease over the fig­ure at year end 2009. To­tal eq­ui­ty in­creased by $200.26 mil­lion or 6.34 per cent, to $3.4 bil­lion com­pared to the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od last fi­nan­cial year. Com­ment­ing in the re­cent­ly re­leased 2009 an­nu­al re­port, Lok Jack de­scribed Neal & Massy's per­for­mance for the 2009 fi­nan­cial year as "com­mend­able, de­spite the pre­vail­ing dif­fi­cult eco­nom­ic con­di­tions" as the Group in­creased its rev­enue by 9.38 per cent over 2008 to $8.4 bil­lion.

How­ev­er, fi­nance costs climbed by 50.74 per cent to $107.67 mil­lion from $71.43 mil­lion in 2008. This con­tributed to a de­crease of 4.15 per cent in prof­its for the year to close Sep­tem­ber at $483.58 mil­lion. Earn­ings per share then stood at $4.53, a de­crease of 57 cents or 11.18 per cent.How­ev­er, div­i­dends per share re­mained un­changed for 2009 at $1.40.�

(Caribbean360.com)