PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd (TCL) yes­ter­day fol­lowed through on its pro­pos­al to in­crease the price of its ce­ment bags by 15 per cent as a re­sult of the “di­rect and sig­nif­i­cant” im­pact on its cost of pro­duc­tion of the 77 per cent in­crease in its nat­ur­al gas price im­posed by state-owned Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny.

In a let­ter to its cus­tomers last week Mon­day, the ce­ment pro­duc­er said, “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 on sacks.”

When con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, sev­er­al hard­ware own­ers and op­er­a­tors con­firmed the in­crease in the price of TCL’s ce­ment bags.

Ari­ma-based hard­ware store Yee Ken Hard­ware list­ed the price for TCL’s Pre­mi­um Plus 42.5 kg at $77.34 on its web­site, while an of­fi­cial at Bhag­wans­ingh’s hard­ware stat­ed the same sack cost was $74.61 be­fore VAT was added. That sack of ce­ment had pre­vi­ous­ly been sold for $67 at var­i­ous hard­wares.

The in­creased price of TCL’s ce­ment, which is man­u­fac­tured at its Clax­ton Bay plant, places it well above the cost of the com­mod­i­ty sold by Rock Hard, which im­ports its ce­ment.

Rock Hard ce­ment cur­rent­ly re­tails for about $62.

TCL’s Eco Ce­ment line, which was pre­vi­ous­ly seen as the cost ef­fec­tive al­ter­na­tive to Rock Hard at $58, was of­fi­cial­ly list­ed at $68 on the Yee Ken Hard­ware web­site on Mon­day.

While Bhag­wans­ingh’s could not state the price of TCL’s Eco line when con­tact­ed, the of­fi­cial was cer­tain that price had risen above the Rock Hard’s $62 cost.

As a re­sult of the in­crease, some hard­ware own­ers when con­tact­ed yes­ter­day said they were now con­cerned that the lo­cal­ly based com­pa­ny was no longer com­pet­i­tive com­pared to Rock Hard.

Rock Hard re­turned to T&T last year af­ter a four-year ab­sence from the do­mes­tic mar­ket. The com­pa­ny left the lo­cal mar­ket af­ter los­ing a le­gal dis­pute chal­leng­ing quo­tas im­posed on im­port­ed ce­ment in the lo­cal mar­ket.

The com­pa­ny re­turned af­ter an ad­just­ment was made in the wake of TCL’s price in­crease last year, the fifth such price in­crease by the com­pa­ny in five years.

TCL an­nounced a sixth price in­crease in six years last week, af­ter stat­ing in a let­ter that nat­ur­al gas is a crit­i­cal in­put in ce­ment man­u­fac­tur­ing and not­ed that it did not sup­port the pro­posed in­crease sug­gest­ed by NGC.

The com­pa­ny said based on the in­crease as well as in­creas­es in costs re­lat­ed to raw ma­te­ri­als, pack­ag­ing and in­fla­tion it had no choice but to raise prices again.

Last week, TCL along with the ANSA McAL group left the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion.