The West In­di­an To­bac­co Com­pa­ny Ltd (Wit­co) has re­port­ed a five per cent in­crease in rev­enue for the first quar­ter of 2026, re­flect­ing con­tin­ued com­mer­cial mo­men­tum de­spite per­sis­tent in­dus­try chal­lenges.

For the three months end­ed March 31, 2026, the com­pa­ny gen­er­at­ed rev­enue of $87.22 mil­lion, up from the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od in 2025 as post­ed in its unau­dit­ed in­ter­im re­sults.

De­spite the rise in rev­enue, prof­itabil­i­ty saw a slight de­cline.

Prof­it be­fore tax stood at $19.86 mil­lion, mar­gin­al­ly be­low the fig­ure record­ed in the same pe­ri­od last year.

Net prof­it to­talled $13.94 mil­lion, rep­re­sent­ing a de­crease of $0.76 mil­lion or 5.2 per cent com­pared to the first quar­ter of 2025. The com­pa­ny at­trib­uted this dip to on­go­ing pres­sures with­in the op­er­at­ing en­vi­ron­ment.

The com­pa­ny em­pha­sised its con­tin­ued com­mit­ment to re­build­ing sus­tain­able vol­ume and val­ue over the medi­um term, not­ing that key pri­or­i­ties in­clude lever­ag­ing the strength of its prod­uct port­fo­lio, en­hanc­ing route-to-mar­ket ef­fi­cien­cy, and strength­en­ing sales ex­e­cu­tion.

The com­pa­ny said it al­so re­mains fo­cused on im­prov­ing op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy across both do­mes­tic and ex­port chan­nels as it seeks to main­tain com­pet­i­tive­ness.

How­ev­er, the out­look re­mains in­flu­enced by ex­ter­nal fac­tors, par­tic­u­lar­ly the grow­ing preva­lence of il­lic­it to­bac­co prod­ucts as it stat­ed, “The con­tin­ued growth of il­lic­it prod­ucts rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant threat to the le­gal to­bac­co in­dus­try. The re­cent ex­cise in­crease has ex­ac­er­bat­ed this sit­u­a­tion.”

De­spite these head­winds, Wit­co main­tains that it is strate­gi­cal­ly po­si­tioned to nav­i­gate the evolv­ing land­scape.

While it con­tin­ues to adapt to fis­cal and reg­u­la­to­ry de­vel­op­ments, the com­pa­ny un­der­scored that ef­fec­tive man­age­ment of il­lic­it trade would be cen­tral to sus­tain­ing long-term growth and in­dus­try sta­bil­i­ty.