In­vestors on the lo­cal stock mar­ket ex­pe­ri­enced a fourth year of de­clin­ing share prices in 2025, pri­mar­i­ly due to a stag­nant econ­o­my, wan­ing in­sti­tu­tion­al in­vestor in­ter­est, re­duced trad­ing ac­tiv­i­ty and a strug­gling en­er­gy sec­tor.

In 2025, the main T&T Com­pos­ite In­dex dropped by close to 12 per cent and the All T&T In­dex de­clined by over 13 per cent.

The loss­es ex­pe­ri­enced by in­vestors in the main­ly TT-dol­lar stock mar­ket since 2022 are sub­stan­tial:

• ↓In 2024, the Com­pos­ite In­dex fell by 11.60 per cent, while the All T&T In­dex de­clined by 12.74 per cent;

• ↓In 2023, the Com­pos­ite In­dex, de­creased by 8.87 per cent and the All T&T In­dex de­creased by 9.8 per cent; and

• ↓In 2022, the Com­pos­ite In­dex was down by 11.01 per cent and the All T&T In­dex de­creased by 3.69 per cent.

Speak­ing in an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian at the be­gin­ning of Feb­ru­ary 2025, CEO of the T&T Stock Ex­change (TTSE), Eva Mitchell, ex­pressed con­fi­dence that the lo­cal stock mar­ket would re­cov­er last year.

“Let’s look at the op­por­tu­ni­ty in the mar­kets. I think now, even though the mar­ket has been on a de­cline over the last two to three years, stock mar­kets nat­u­ral­ly get to a point where they bot­tom off, and then they shift. And I think now is a time when that shift will hap­pen. So, I en­cour­age in­vestors, both in­sti­tu­tion­al and re­tail in­vestors, to take ad­van­tage of the op­por­tu­ni­ties now with any stock mar­ket,” Mitchell said.

In 2025, four of the five com­mer­cial banks list­ed on the T&T Stock Ex­change (TTSE) saw de­clines in their share prices, with CIBC Caribbean be­ing the ex­cep­tion, ris­ing by un­der 2.0 per cent.

All three of the con­glom­er­ates were down, while six of the sev­en man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies ex­pe­ri­enced a de­crease in their prices. The on­ly man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny whose share price in­creased was Unilever Caribbean Ltd, up by about 23 per cent. Unilever stopped man­u­fac­tur­ing in T&T in Ju­ly 2022 and is due to be re-cat­e­gorised as a trad­ing com­pa­ny. The four com­pa­nies in the non-bank­ing/fi­nance seg­ment were down.

Of the four trad­ing com­pa­nies, with five stocks, AS Bry­den, Pres­tige Hold­ings and LJ Williams ‘B’ all pro­duced dou­ble dig­it share price in­creas­es. T&T-head­quar­tered AS Bry­den, which was list­ed on the lo­cal stock mar­ket in Au­gust, was the best per­form­ing stock on the TTSE last year, in­creas­ing by more than 65 per cent.

Every­body los­es

The per­for­mance of the lo­cal stock mar­ket does not on­ly im­pact the hun­dreds of in­di­vid­u­als who trade shares on a reg­u­lar ba­sis.

The Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board (NIB), the State so­cial se­cu­ri­ty en­ti­ty, is the sec­ond largest share­hold­er of Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd (RFHL) with 18.8 per cent of the re­gion’s largest and most prof­itable fi­nan­cial ser­vices com­pa­ny. The NIB’s stake in RFHL was worth $3.24 bil­lion on Fri­day. In 2025, RFHL's share price de­clined by $9.72, which meant that the val­ue of the NIB's 30,811,955 shares in the fi­nan­cial hold­ing com­pa­ny was down by $299.49 mil­lion. That pa­per loss was mit­i­gat­ed by the $6 per share div­i­dend de­clared by RFHL in 2025, which trans­lat­ed in­to $184.87 mil­lion in div­i­dends for the NIB from its RFHL shares last year.

The NIB is the largest share­hold­er of Massy Hold­ings, with a 20 per cent stake, equal to $396,021,020 shares. The NIB col­lect­ed $70.09 mil­lion in de­clared div­i­dends from its Massy shares.

The NIB al­so holds shares in sev­er­al oth­er T&T-list­ed com­pa­nies and in its 2024 an­nu­al re­port—the 2025 an­nu­al re­port was due to be made pub­lic at the end of No­vem­ber—the in­sti­tu­tion re­port­ed that the mar­ket val­ue of its in­vest­ment port­fo­lio was $27 bil­lion. Of that amount, eq­ui­ties com­prised $17 bil­lion.

Lo­cal pen­sion plans are re­quired to hold a min­i­mum of 80 per cent of their to­tal as­sets in lo­cal in­vest­ments. That reg­u­la­tion stems from the In­sur­ance Act, which lim­its for­eign in­vest­ments to a max­i­mum of 20 per cent of the to­tal fund as­sets. Reg­is­tered pen­sion plans are per­mit­ted to in­vest in eq­ui­ties up to a max­i­mum of 50 per cent of their to­tal as­set val­ue.

That means many of the in­vest­ment port­fo­lios of lo­cal pen­sions plans would have sus­tained loss­es on the val­ue of their lo­cal eq­ui­ties in 2025, and in the three pre­vi­ous years. That is bad news for pen­sion plans of­fer­ing de­fined con­tri­bu­tion pen­sions.

Reg­u­la­to­ry con­straints

De­lays by re­gion­al com­pe­ti­tion com­mis­sions im­pact­ed two trans­ac­tions in­volv­ing the Agos­ti­ni Group, one of T&T’s fastest grow­ing, pub­licly list­ed non-en­er­gy com­pa­nies.

On Feb­ru­ary 3, 2025, Agos­ti­ni’s Ltd an­nounced that its sub­sidiary, Caribbean Dis­tri­b­u­tion Part­ners (CDP), signed a share pur­chase agree­ment to ac­quire 100 per cent of Massy Dis­tri­b­u­tion (Ja­maica), a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and con­sumer prod­ucts dis­tri­b­u­tion com­pa­ny in Ja­maica,

Agos­ti­ni’s owns 50 per cent of CDP, in a joint ven­ture with Bar­ba­di­an com­pa­ny God­dard En­ter­pris­es.

In No­vem­ber, Ja­maica’s Fair Trad­ing Com­mis­sion re­viewed the trans­ac­tion and iden­ti­fied sig­nif­i­cant com­pe­ti­tion con­cerns in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of in­sulin prod­ucts in Ja­maica. The Com­mis­sion felt that the pro­posed trans­ac­tion would cre­ate a mo­nop­oly dis­trib­u­tor for these brands.

In June, Agos­ti­ni an­nounced that its pro­posed to make a takeover bid for 100 per cent of the 62,513,002 com­mon shares of Pres­tige Hold­ings Ltd (PHL), which holds the fran­chis­es for a num­ber of Amer­i­can quick ser­vice restau­rants, in­clud­ing KFC and Piz­za Hut

The takeover bid by Agos­ti­ni was most­ly a non-cash of­fer, via a share swap of 4.8 Pres­tige Hold­ings shares in ex­change for every one Agos­ti­ni share.

The bid pro­posed the is­sue of 13,022,334 new com­mon Agos­ti­ni shares as con­sid­er­a­tion for the ac­qui­si­tion of 100 per cent of the com­pa­ny.

In ex­plain­ing the strate­gic ra­tio­nale of the pro­posed trans­ac­tion, Agos­ti­ni said, “The pro­posed ac­qui­si­tion of Pres­tige Hold­ings is a strate­gic mile­stone in Agos­ti­ni Lim­it­ed’s long-term strat­e­gy to build a more di­ver­si­fied, re­silient, and con­sumer-ori­ent­ed busi­ness that con­tin­ues its pur­suit of growth and en­hanced prof­itabil­i­ty.

“As the op­er­at­ing en­vi­ron­ment across the Caribbean con­tin­ues to evolve, Agos­ti­ni is fo­cused on deep­en­ing its reach in­to sec­tors char­ac­terised by ro­bust and grow­ing con­sumer de­mand, brand-dri­ven loy­al­ty and re­cur­ring cash flows.”

The Agos­ti­ni group ex­plained that it is prin­ci­pal­ly en­gaged in three dis­tinct seg­ments - phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal & health­care, con­sumer prod­ucts and en­er­gy and in­dus­tri­al sup­plies and ser­vices. With­in both the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and con­sumer prod­ucts seg­ments, the group has dis­tri­b­u­tion, man­u­fac­tur­ing and re­tail op­er­a­tions while the en­er­gy and in­dus­tri­al sup­plies and ser­vices seg­ment en­com­pass­es dis­tri­b­u­tion and ser­vice op­er­a­tions, said the group.

There is no ob­vi­ous over­lap be­tween Agos­ti­ni’s ex­ist­ing busi­ness­es and a restau­rant chain, but the trans­ac­tion re­quired the sign-off of T&T’s Fair Trad­ing Com­mis­sion.

The trans­ac­tion, which was an­nounced on June 13, was pushed back on five oc­ca­sions be­cause of the non-ap­point­ment of a board of the T&T Fair Trad­ing Com­mis­sion by the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Vic­tor E Mout­tet Ltd (VEML), and its con­nect­ed com­pa­nies, own a com­bined to­tal of 68.4 per cent of Pres­tige Hold­ings. VEML and its con­nect­ed par­ties own 57.8 per cent of Agos­ti­ni.

“Ac­cord­ing­ly, this trans­ac­tion con­sti­tutes a ‘re­lat­ed par­ty trans­ac­tion’ for the pur­pos­es of reg­u­la­to­ry dis­clo­sure and share­hold­er ap­proval,” ac­cord­ing to the Agos­ti­ni share­hold­er cir­cu­lar.