Unilever Caribbean Ltd (UCL) yes­ter­day de­clared prof­it af­ter tax of $16.2 mil­lion for the first quar­ter of 2025, an in­crease of 169 per cent when com­pared to $6.02 mil­lion­for the same pe­ri­od in 2024.

In its unau­dit­ed fi­nan­cial re­sults for the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary 1 to March 31, 2025, Unilever said its rev­enue closed at $81.2 mil­lion, which was 42.3 per cent more than it gen­er­at­ed for the same pe­ri­od last year. The com­pa­ny's rev­enue per­for­mance in­clud­ed sig­nif­i­cant one-off trans­ac­tions re­lat­ing to its new dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­el.

Unilever chair Daniela Bu­caro ex­plained the change in its dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­el is a strate­gic re­cal­i­bra­tion and a crit­i­cal el­e­ment in en­sur­ing sus­tain­able growth while nav­i­gat­ing the chal­leng­ing and dy­nam­ic eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment.

"Rev­enue this quar­ter in­clud­ed stock trans­fers to our two ap­point­ed na­tion­al dis­trib­u­tors as the UCL op­er­at­ed ware­house was closed. Ex­clud­ing these stock trans­fers, to­tal rev­enue de­clined by ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2.2 per cent, dri­ven main­ly by the home care seg­ment. A net re­struc­tur­ing cost of $0.4 mil­lion is di­rect­ly at­trib­uted to the adop­tion of the new route-to-mar­ket mod­el," Bu­caro said.

The com­pa­ny said its beau­ty and per­son­al care di­vi­sion is grow­ing and con­tin­ues to per­form well and now ac­counts for 53 per cent of to­tal turnover.

How­ev­er, Bu­caro said the home care cat­e­go­ry, faced some chal­lenges in the lo­cal mar­ket with in­tense pric­ing com­pe­ti­tion re­sult­ing in de­mand con­straints for pow­dered de­ter­gents.

Lo­cal­ly, the com­pa­ny said its brands Cif and Quix, re­port­ed mar­gin­al growth and in the ex­port mar­kets, there was rev­enue growth in the fab­ric clean­ing cat­e­go­ry.

The foods and re­fresh­ments cat­e­go­ry closed the quar­ter rel­a­tive­ly flat ver­sus the pri­or year, main­tain­ing its 11 per cent share of the to­tal com­pa­ny rev­enue.

Bu­caro said cost con­tain­ment was achieved across all pa­ra­me­ters with­in the prof­it and loss state­ment, con­tribut­ing to a healthy op­er­at­ing prof­it of $23.8 mil­lion be­fore re­struc­tur­ing.

The com­pa­ny re­sults pro­vid­ed earn­ings per share for the quar­ter of $0.62, in­di­cat­ing a note­wor­thy in­crease from $0.23 per share in the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od of 2024.

Bu­caro added, "While we do not un­der­es­ti­mate po­ten­tial chal­lenges in the eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment, our com­mit­ment re­mains stead­fast: to de­liv­er long-term val­ue to our share­hold­ers, cus­tomers and stake­hold­ers."

The board of di­rec­tors ap­proved a quar­ter­ly in­ter­im div­i­dend of $0.16 per share, amount­ing to $4.2 mil­lion, based on the com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial per­for­mance.