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Friday, July 4, 2025

Carib goes on sale in India

by

PETER CHRISTOPHER
49 days ago
20250516
ANSA McAL Group CEO Anthony N Sabga III addresses investment analysts and journalists at the group’s release of financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2025 yesterday at Samaan Estate in St Clair.

ANSA McAL Group CEO Anthony N Sabga III addresses investment analysts and journalists at the group’s release of financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2025 yesterday at Samaan Estate in St Clair.

ROGER JACOB

Pe­ter Christo­pher

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

Carib beer, which is part of the ANSA McAL group, is of­fi­cial­ly on sale in In­dia.

ANSA McAL Group CEO, An­tho­ny Sab­ga III, dis­closed yes­ter­day that Carib of­fi­cial­ly went to mar­ket in the sub­con­ti­nent this week.

“Not on­ly is it in the works, the brand and man­u­fac­tur­ing team just re­turned from Ut­tar Pradesh about a week ago, and the first pro­duc­tion of com­mer­cial­ly avail­able new Carib has been re­leased,” said Sab­ga, at the re­lease of the group’s fi­nan­cial re­sults for the quar­ter end­ed March 31 2025, at Samaan Es­tate, St Clair yes­ter­day.

“So our part­ner in that mar­ket, the Globus bev­er­age or­gan­i­sa­tion, is work­ing with us in a joint ven­ture and we have be­gun mar­ket­ing Carib in In­dia,” he said.

In April last year, the group an­nounced the part­ner­ship with Globus Spir­its Ltd, aim­ing to bring the lo­cal beer to In­dia, based on in­ter­est in the brand as a re­sult of West In­dies crick­et.

The ANSA McAl CEO said the beer had on­ly hit shelves this week, but there was al­ready good feed­back.

“That re­lease lit­er­al­ly hap­pened days ago. So, we’ve just start­ed sell­ing that prod­uct in In­dia. The qual­i­ty team re­port that we have a fan­tas­tic brew and that we ex­pect to do phe­nom­e­nal­ly well with in In­dia.”

ANSA McAL’s rev­enue in­creased 10 per cent to $1.80 bil­lion year-over-year for the first three months of its 2025 fi­nan­cial year. The group’s prof­it be­fore tax stood at $93 mil­lion for the three months end­ed March 31, 2025, a 46 per cent de­cline com­pared to the pri­or year and its ad­just­ed earn­ings be­fore in­ter­est, tax, de­pre­ci­a­tion and amor­ti­sa­tion (EBIT­DA) de­clined by 6 per cent to $278 mil­lion.

“These re­sults, whilst not the type of re­sults that we are ac­cus­tomed to here at ANSA McAL, are cer­tain­ly not re­sults that we are dis­cour­aged by,” said Sab­ga, who ex­plained that the com­pa­ny has to do some ad­just­ments to its ap­proach with its re­cent in­vest­ment in the US of Bleachtech, due to un­fore­seen weath­er chal­lenges. The com­pa­ny was ac­quired by ANSA McAl in No­vem­ber 2024.

“Apart from the plant and the pipes in the plant freez­ing, we re­alised that you can­not treat ice the way you treat wa­ter. So we end­ed up in a very mut­ed mar­ket, and so our plant had some chal­lenges,” Sab­ga said.

“What that af­ford­ed us was an op­por­tu­ni­ty to bring for­ward some of the much-need­ed in­ter­ven­tions and some of the much-need­ed re­pair work for the plant and equip­ment. We bought an op­er­at­ing 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 trend­ing up­wards.”

Sab­ga al­so stat­ed there was a soft­en­ing in the econ­o­my in the first quar­ter ahead of the elec­tion. He al­so ex­pressed some con­cern that the Trinidad and To­ba­go Stock Ex­change had not cre­at­ed the lev­el of re­turns that may have been ex­pect­ed.

“We re­main very com­mit­ted to the en­deav­our and to the in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ty, the in­vest­ment cli­mate and pos­si­bil­i­ties that re­main avail­able to us and al­so the re­align­ment of fur­ther in­vest­ment in the fu­ture growth of the or­gan­i­sa­tion. This comes from us rec­og­niz­ing that the Trinidad and To­ba­go stock mar­ket re­al­ly has not de­liv­ered the type of wealth cre­ation re­turns over the last 10 years. That’s some­thing we feel that as an or­gan­i­sa­tion we can fun­da­men­tal­ly in­ter­vene, “ he said.

Sab­ga said the group’s way of op­er­at­ing pre­vi­ous­ly was preser­va­tion and pro­vid­ing a pas­sive yield. But, he not­ed, that the dy­nam­ic of its busi­ness has changed fun­da­men­tal­ly and it is now seek­ing to make sub­stan­tial rein­vest­ments in­to ANSA McAL’s com­pa­nies.

“Di­ver­sion of the div­i­dend is one ex­am­ple of such, which we ex­pect to lead to sub­stan­tial ap­pre­ci­a­tion of val­ue and chas­ing ac­tive and on­go­ing growth.”


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