PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

The dri­ve for in­creased per­son­al care and hy­giene in the wake of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has pushed Unilever Caribbean to prof­it in 2020, af­ter suf­fer­ing sig­nif­i­cant loss­es a year ear­li­er.

The com­pa­ny record­ed af­ter tax prof­it of $18,607,000 for 2020.

Gross prof­it in­creased by 23.7 per cent to $130.4, with op­er­at­ing prof­it in­creas­ing to $22 mil­lion com­pared to $500,000 in 2019.

The com­pa­ny re­port­ed it has gen­er­at­ed $64.1 mil­lion from op­er­at­ing ac­tiv­i­ties, which equates to more than dou­ble last year’s achieve­ments.

The fi­nal cash po­si­tion of the com­pa­ny in­creased by over $20m to $75.4m com­pared to the fig­ure of $51.7m record­ed in 2019.

Unilever re­alised in­creased rev­enue earn­ing $290m, an im­prove­ment over last year’s fig­ure of $284.5m, which rep­re­sents a 1.9 per cent in­crease on last year’s earn­ings.

In his re­view of the com­pa­ny’s Au­dit­ed Fi­nan­cial state­ment, Unilever chair­man Ro­dri­go So­tomay­or said, “this was dri­ven by a very strong per­for­mance in the do­mes­tic mar­ket, re­sult­ing in growth of 10.7 per­cent, most­ly dri­ven by the beau­ty and per­son­al care, and foods & re­fresh­ments di­vi­sions.”

The com­pa­ny said key ad­just­ments to their strat­e­gy al­so helped as it “was able to re­spond with the launch of many im­pact­ful in­no­va­tions through­out the year, such as new an­ti-bac­te­r­i­al vari­ants and the in­tro­duc­tion of Dove ba­by and Suave Kids.”

In 2019, the com­pa­ny com­plet­ed a re­view of its busi­ness mod­el which it was hoped would path it on a sus­tain­able and prof­itable op­er­a­tion.

So­tomay­or said while the out­look sug­gests con­tin­ued chal­lenges as COVID-19 ef­fects are set to re­main for some time “the com­pa­ny has al­ready demon­strat­ed that it pos­sess­es the abil­i­ty to with­stand dif­fi­cult chal­lenges and emerge even stronger from it.”