ANSA McAL Group CEO, An­tho­ny Sab­ga III, says he has ab­solute­ly no re­grets at the group’s de­ci­sion to sus­pend its div­i­dends for three years in or­der to re­al­lo­cate cap­i­tal to fund fu­ture ac­qui­si­tions, as well as con­tin­ue in­vest­ing in tech­nol­o­gy and au­toma­tion to dri­ve ef­fi­cien­cies and op­ti­mise sup­ply chains.

Speak­ing to the Busi­ness Guardian, Sab­ga said the sus­pen­sion of div­i­dends is go­ing to cor­re­late with very sub­stan­tial growth and it is go­ing to en­sure the de­liv­ery of fu­ture pros­per­i­ty.

“The re­al­lo­ca­tion of re­sources to sup­port the in­vest­ment hori­zon and al­so the fu­ture sus­tain­able de­liv­ery of in­come and div­i­dends is not some­thing we’re re­think­ing and not some­thing that we’re re­gret­ting,” Sab­ga said.

The ANSA McAL group paid out $1.80 per share in div­i­dends in the four-year pe­ri­od 2021 to 2024. With 176,197,617 shares in is­sue, that equals $317.15 mil­lion (US$47 mil­lion) a year or $1.26 bil­lion (US$188 mil­lion) over the four-year pe­ri­od.

In at­tempt­ing to achieve its Times Two goals, the group has been strength­en­ing its core busi­ness­es, which are bev­er­ages, chem­i­cals and bank­ing and in­sur­ance.

Asked if there were any for­mal com­plaints from share­hold­ers over the sus­pen­sion of div­i­dends, Sab­ga said, “I wouldn’t say that I have had any for­mal com­plaints. What we have no­ticed is that in­ter­est­ing­ly, there were some pub­lic let­ters writ­ten in the news­pa­per. But when we checked, those peo­ple were not even share­hold­ers.  

“We have, though, looked in­to and got ap­pre­ci­a­tion from some share­hold­ers who have trad­ed in their shares. And al­so in­ter­est­ing­ly, the share­hold­ers who have now bought in­to the share and the lev­el of con­fi­dence that they con­tin­ue to have, even those that sold, re­mains quite ro­bust.”

He not­ed that some peo­ple sold their shares based on where they are in their life cy­cle. What has been quite in­ter­est­ing, he said, is the crop of new share­hold­ers has in­clud­ed ac­tive groups of young peo­ple.  

“This is a gen­er­a­tion of in­vestors that we are deeply com­mit­ted to, deeply in­ter­est­ed in, and en­cour­aged by for en­vi­ron­men­tal and gov­er­nance and sus­tain­abil­i­ty pro­grammes as well as the very good feed­back around the mar­ket’s in­ter­est.”

As it per­tains to ac­qui­si­tions, Sab­ga said the group—hav­ing just com­plet­ed the most sig­nif­i­cant ac­qui­si­tion in the his­to­ry of the group,the US-based chlo­ral­ka­li pro­duc­er Bleachtech LLC via its US sub­sidiary ANSA Chem­i­cals US LLC—has been very busy en­sur­ing the in­te­gra­tion of the com­pa­ny and the ex­e­cu­tion of the post-ac­qui­si­tion plan.

“That be­ing said, we are not in a po­si­tion to re­veal or speak di­rect­ly on any of the ac­qui­si­tions that we have in the pipeline. As an or­gan­i­sa­tion, as a team, we con­tin­ue to man­age and hold quite a ro­bust and quite ben­e­fi­cial view of ac­qui­si­tions.  So we do have our sights set on quite a few oth­er items, our bal­ance sheet re­mains avail­able for ad­di­tion­al points, and that is some­thing that is a part of our cul­ture of the or­gan­i­sa­tion. We re­main very for­ward look­ing,” the CEO ex­plained.

Bleachtech, which is based in Cleve­land, Ohio, op­er­ates two chlo­ral­ka­li plants in Seville, Ohio and Pe­ters­burg, Vir­ginia that pro­duce sodi­um hypochlo­rite (bleach), sodi­um hy­drox­ide (caus­tic so­da) and hy­drochlo­ric acid.

The pur­chase price was US$327 mil­lion.

Dur­ing a stake­hold­ers meet­ing last Thurs­day, Sab­ga said, “The group closed the Bleachtech trans­ac­tion in No­vem­ber 2024, and in the first quar­ter of 2025, the com­pa­ny was im­pact­ed by what is af­fec­tion­ate­ly called the big freeze. Hav­ing op­er­at­ed a chlo­rine busi­ness in the Caribbean for over 40 years, the group has dealt with many things, but freez­ing over was not one of them.  

“Apart from the plant, and the pipes in the plant freez­ing, we re­alised that you can­not treat ice. We end­ed up in a very mut­ed mar­ket, and so our plant had some chal­lenges. That af­ford­ed us an op­por­tu­ni­ty to bring for­ward some of the much-need­ed in­ter­ven­tions and some of the much-need­ed re­pair work for the plant and equip­ment,” Sab­ga said.

He added that ANSA McAL bought a busi­ness that was op­er­at­ing at sub-44 per cent ef­fi­cien­cy. I’m hap­py to re­port that the team has done quite a bit of work and the re­li­a­bil­i­ty and op­er­at­ing ef­fi­cien­cies of the plant are north of 60 per cent and tread­ing up­wards,” he ex­plained.

The ac­qui­si­tion of Bleachtech was large­ly fi­nanced by a US$$200 mil­lion term loan orig­i­nat­ed in the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket. The ac­qui­si­tion and oth­er cap­i­tal im­prove­ments in­creased the group’s gear­ing ra­tio—a com­par­i­son of a com­pa­ny’s debt to its share­hold­er eq­ui­ty—from 7.5 per cent at the end of 2023 to 28.4 per cent at the end of 2024.

Sab­ga said the debt the group took on to sup­port the ac­qui­si­tion, and the in­ter­est ex­pense of that debt, is go­ing to be on its prof­it and loss ac­count.

In its fi­nan­cial year end­ed De­cem­ber 31, 2024, ANSA McAL de­clared prof­it af­ter tax of $675.54 mil­lion, an in­crease of 13.6 per cent com­pared to the $594.48 mil­lion prof­it in 2023.

For the two months from the date of the ac­qui­si­tion, Bleachtech con­tributed $67.7 mil­lion to­wards the group’s rev­enue of $7.4 bil­lion. Bleachtech record­ed a prof­it be­fore tax of $36.5 mil­lion in the last two month of 2024. The group record­ed prof­it be­fore tax of $905.8 mil­lion for all of its 2024 fi­nan­cial year.

In the three months end­ed March 31, 2025, ANSA McAL re­port­ed af­ter-tax prof­it of $65.02 mil­lion, a de­cline of 48.5 per cent com­pared to the pri­or year’s first quar­ter prof­it of $126.33 mil­lion.

Sab­ga said the group start­ed the amor­ti­sa­tion of the debt from the ac­qui­si­tion in 2025 and ANSA McAL was chal­lenged by not be­ing able to re­port the ex­pect­ed lev­el of rev­enues in the first quar­ter. For the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary 1 to March 31, 2025, ANSA McAL gen­er­at­ed $1.80 bil­lion in rev­enue, 9.5 per cent more than for the same pe­ri­od in 2024

“What I’m en­cour­aged by is that this is not a sys­temic is­sue. This is what I re­fer to as a bit of a siz­able glitch. We al­so, as an or­gan­i­sa­tion, took ad­van­tage of the op­por­tu­ni­ty to pro­cure a fair­ly size­able ac­qui­si­tion of some for­eign ex­change, which has been placed in our re­serves and to sup­port on­go­ing ac­qui­si­tions.”

Asked whether ANSA McAL has con­sid­ered di­vest­ing com­pa­nies or di­vi­sions in or­der to gen­er­ate cash to fund its ex­pan­sion, the con­glom­er­ate’s CEO said, “The group has an ex­treme­ly large port­fo­lio of busi­ness­es and as­sets and, as we’ve been go­ing along, we have been di­vest­ing cer­tain non-strate­gic re­al es­tate. You would have seen very re­cent­ly we di­vest­ed ANSA Tech which re­mains not strate­gic in our port­fo­lio. We’re al­ways look­ing at where there are op­por­tu­ni­ties to trim the port­fo­lio, and that is on­go­ing. It’s part of what we do.”

Ques­tioned on whether the en­vi­ron­ment in this coun­try is con­ducive for com­pa­nies ex­pand­ing their for­eign ex­change gen­er­a­tion, Sab­ga III said he be­lieves there’s al­ways an op­por­tu­ni­ty.

“Cul­tur­al­ly and philo­soph­i­cal­ly as a group, we seek to in­ter­vene in those op­por­tu­ni­ties that ex­ist, and I think those op­por­tu­ni­ties are there for who­ev­er has the where­with­al and the de­ter­mi­na­tion. I mean, suc­cess comes from stead­fast­ness and a com­mit­ment to do­ing the right thing and to serv­ing peo­ple with as­sets, with prod­ucts, with ser­vices. So I think, I would say yes, ab­solute­ly, the op­por­tu­ni­ty is there,” he added.