FOLLOWING a prosperous year for the local building and construction industry amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, Carib Cement Company, after achieving a nine per cent year-on-year increase in cement constructions, said the company is now seeking to maximise production capacity as it prepares to satisfy increases in domestic demand.

Carib Cement’s general manager, Yago Castro, said that while the country’s sole cement manufacturing company was producing above market baseline, the aim was to further increase output to match the demands expected to come over the next few years, especially after significant capital investments were made in plant infrastructure.

“Our current capacity is increasing every year — last year we were able to produce close to one million tons of cement and this year we are going to exceed that as our plant has a capacity of 1.4 million tons,” he said during a Mayberry Investor Forum held this week whilst noting that preparations were already being made to capitalise on an additional 25-30 per cent of production capacity in the coming two to three years.

The company, which almost doubled profits last year when it earned $3.2 billion, also saw record growth in revenues of some $20 billion up from the $17.8 billion in 2019. Shareholder’s equity for the year totalled $11.5 billion.

To ensure that the company is positioned to supply market demands and continue its growth performance, Castro said allocations were also being made to facilitate the requisite capex (capital expenditure) training needed to improve efficiencies and deal with productivity issues.

He also said that notwithstanding the uncertainties of the pandemic, the company was also further seeking to capitalise on some projects expected to come on stream in the near future. These include the construction of new hotel rooms following the expected resumption of tourism during the third and fourth quarter of this year, along with the major low-income housing project soon to be rolled out by Government.

“We’ve improved a lot; we are comfortably sourcing the market even in the current situation and we will continue to do so.” We will be prepared and capitalised to respond to whatever the market decides to be, but I really pray and hope that we will lead some golden years in the coming three to five years,” Castro said.

The company, which said that its current focus was rooted in the local market, said that it was also hoping to pursue export opportunities in the near future. “We’re preparing some of the installations close to our ports to increase our export capacity. As soon as we develop some more capacity we will be actively searching for export destinations [of which] we already have a couple of them in mind,” Castro stated.