GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd (TCL) has amend­ed two of its ma­jor loan agree­ments in a move that comes just days af­ter the com­pa­ny con­firmed a 15 per cent in­crease in ce­ment prices.

The fi­nan­cial re­struc­tur­ing was de­tailed in a no­tice post­ed on the T&T Stock Ex­change Thurs­day and is­sued by com­pa­ny sec­re­tary Denise Michelle Roop­nar­i­nesingh. The no­tice stat­ed that on Jan­u­ary 30, 2026, TCL’s board of di­rec­tors au­tho­rised new amend­ment and re­state­ment agree­ments for two ex­ist­ing cred­it fa­cil­i­ties: a TT$35 mil­lion re­volv­ing loan with Citibank (T&T) Ltd and a TT$65 mil­lion fa­cil­i­ty with RBC Mer­chant Bank (Caribbean) Ltd.

"Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd here­by ad­vis­es that, on Jan­u­ary 30, 2026, pur­suant to the au­tho­ri­sa­tion of its Board of Di­rec­tors, the com­pa­ny ex­e­cut­ed: an amend­ment and re­state­ment agree­ment to TCL's re­volv­ing loan agree­ment dat­ed Sep­tem­ber 12, 2023 with Citibank (T&T) Ltd for a prin­ci­pal amount of $35 mil­lion (the Citibank loan), and an amend­ment and re­state­ment agree­ment with RBC Mer­chant Bank (Caribbean) Ltd for a prin­ci­pal amount of $65 mil­lion (the RBC Mer­chant Bank Loan)," the no­tice stat­ed.

Ac­cord­ing to TCL, the pro­ceeds from both loans would con­tin­ue to be used for gen­er­al cor­po­rate pur­pos­es, un­der­scor­ing the com­pa­ny’s fo­cus on se­cur­ing fi­nan­cial flex­i­bil­i­ty as it nav­i­gates ris­ing op­er­a­tional costs and a shift­ing eco­nom­ic land­scape.

The re­vised terms pro­vide a three-year du­ra­tion and ad­just the in­ter­est rate to the open mar­ket op­er­a­tion (OMO) rate plus 250 ba­sis points, an im­prove­ment over the pre­vi­ous OMO plus 275 ba­sis point rate.

The loans re­main guar­an­teed by Ce­mex, TCL’s par­ent com­pa­ny, of­fer­ing ad­di­tion­al as­sur­ance to lenders and in­vestors about the com­pa­ny’s cred­it­wor­thi­ness.

TCL an­nounced this week that it plans to in­crease the price of its ce­ment bags by 15 per cent on Mon­day Feb­ru­ary 9—its sixth con­sec­u­tive an­nu­al ad­just­ment.

In a com­mu­ni­ca­tion to a “val­ued cus­tomer,” the pub­licly list­ed, Clax­ton Bay-head­quar­tered ce­ment pro­duc­er said that fol­low­ing its com­mu­ni­ca­tion on Jan­u­ary 26, it want­ed to share an im­por­tant up­date re­gard­ing re­cent de­vel­op­ments af­fect­ing our op­er­a­tions with po­ten­tial im­pact on the con­struc­tion sec­tor.

“As the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny’s (NGC) pre­vi­ous­ly an­nounced in­crease in nat­ur­al gas prices has now been con­firmed retroac­tive to 1, Jan­u­ary 2026, this is hav­ing a di­rect and sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on TCL’s pro­duc­tion costs.

“While TCL re­mains deeply con­cerned about the broad­er im­pact of these gas prices on your busi­ness, end users and the con­struc­tion sec­tor, it ne­ces­si­tates a 15 per cent price ad­just­ment, ef­fec­tive Feb­ru­ary 9, 2026, on sacks,” TCL had said.

A com­pa­ny source had con­firmed that the ref­er­ence to “sacks,” meant a bag of ce­ment.

TCL said it re­mains firm­ly com­mit­ted to main­tain­ing its op­er­a­tions in T&T, sup­port­ing more than 350 di­rect em­ploy­ees and over 400 lo­cal con­trac­tors and sup­pli­ers, and con­tin­u­ing its con­tri­bu­tion to the econ­o­my as a lead­ing for­eign ex­change gen­er­a­tor, with ex­ports ex­pect­ed to ex­ceed US$40 mil­lion in 2026.