Blue Power Group Ltd hopes to sign a deal with Seprod Ltd for the production of two laundry soap brands for export within the Caricom market come October.

An optimistic chairman of Blue Power, Dhiru Tanna, told the Jamaica Observer that the company now looks forward to closing the contract with Seprod by the end of September for production of the Diamond and Cannon laundry soaps.

“We are working on an agreement now; they are going to sign with us for us to produce those brands. The brands are not sold in Jamaica, but they have a very good export market, so we will make the soap for them and they will continue to export,” Tanna said.

He added that Blue Power is prepared to efficiently produce the laundry soaps, following the company’s decision to invest $65 million in the expansion of its soap line and warehouse space. Production of the two new brands is expected to consume at least 10 per cent of the soap division’s capacity.

During the year, Blue Power increased warehousing capacity, added air conditioning to the lumber depot, new bathing soap machinery, streamlined its production processes, implemented a second shift, introduced new products and new packaging, and started co-packing for three more distributors. In the process the company added 18 more jobs across the two divisions.

The company anticipates that the production of Seprod’s Diamond and Cannon soaps could run up to 5,000 cases per month, with most of its exports aimed at the Guyanese market — a market in which Blue Power recently got a toehold for its own laundry soap brand.

Blue Power Group closed its first quarter 2017 with 12 per cent improvement in sales from $339 million to $381 million, largely driven by export sales which continued to outpace increases in sales in the domestic market.

Profits after tax for the group inched up by a little over $1 million to $38.5 million compared to the $37 million posted for the same period a year earlier. Profit for the company’s lumber division jumped by eight per cent, while the soap division showed marginal decline of one per cent.

Earnings per share showed marginal improvement from $0.66 to $0.68

“Our balance sheet has been freshened with the repayment of the DBJ loan which we had acquired to install the solar system at Victoria Avenue. The reason for early repayment is to eliminate the interest cost of the loan,” Tanna told shareholders in the company’s recently released quarterly report.

Blue Power operates from two areas of Kingston — a soap factory in downtown Kingston at Victoria Avenue, and its lumber depot in Papine. The company remains virtually debt-free with long-term liabilities at $1.9 million, a fraction of its capital base of more than $700 million.