Apex Footwear not tapping yet

Apex Footwear is just not seeing its cash counters ringing at its 260 retail points like before even though customers are back in stores once again after being homebound for a few months soon after coronavirus arrived on these shores.

Between October and December of last year, when the wheels of the economy were in full motion, the local footwear giant saw its profit slump about 61.4 per cent to Tk 1.8 crore.

During the quarter, sales were down about 25.8 per cent year-on-year to Tk 254 crore.

The quarter’s takings take Apex Footwear’s profit in the first six months of its 2020-21 financial year, which runs from July to June, to Tk 4.1 crore, down 29.8 per cent from a year earlier.

Apex Footwear, a subsidiary of Apex Group, though blames the drop in profit to the lower volume of exports, according to Md. Omar Faruque, its company secretary.

“There was an unprecedented fall in exports,” he told Dhaka Tribune. 

The company, which has 135 clients in Europe, North America and Japan, does not disclose what portion of its earnings come from exports.

Apex Footwear though has posted three consecutive years of lower profit.

Its profit was down 49.3 per cent to Tk 6.3 crore in its 2019-20 financial year. And in the previous year, profit was down 5.4 per cent to Tk 12.3 crore.

The deterioration in the bottom line is reflected in the company’s stock price, which lost about 26.3 per cent in value over the past two years. 

Shares of Apex Footwear, which has been listed since 1993, closed at Tk 219.3 yesterday, down 0.05 per cent from the previous day.

The company announced a cash dividend of 25 per cent in its last financial year, down from 55 per cent it disbursed in 2018-19.