Bangas just cannot seem to catch a break

Bangas' misfortune carried well into 2021 as its net profit for the second quarter of FY 2020-21 nosedived a whopping 99 per cent, compared to the same quarter of the previous fiscal.

The figure, obtained from an un-audited financial statement released yesterday, said that the company reported a net profit of Tk 22.87 lakh and earnings per share (EPS) of Tk 0.03, which was Tk 43.46 crore and Tk 0.57 respectively in the previous year.

Their stocks fell 2.24 per cent to Tk 118.10 yesterday, after the declaration of its earnings was posted on the Dhaka Stock Exchange website.

Their EPS was Tk 0.18 for October-December’20 as against Tk 0.33 for the same period previous year.

The company has been manufacturing 20 types of biscuits and cookies for more than three decades now, but its recent financial figures suggest it has lost its way in recent times.

Bangas exports its products to the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. The company was incorporated in 1979 and is based in Dhaka.

Other biscuit makers capitalised on their downfall, as Olympic Industries saw its profit leap 2 per cent to Tk 107 crore, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, in its second quarter (July-December’20) of current financial year.

The financial year, which concluded on June 30, overlapped with the coronavirus-induced lockdowns in much of the world, a development that benefitted biscuit makers everywhere as people munched on biscuits while stuck at home.

Bangas blamed its underwhelming performance in the 2019-20 financial year -- for which it announced a 5 per cent cash dividend in contrast to a 5 per cent cash and a 5 per cent stock dividend in the previous year -- on the pandemic and increasing production costs.

“Our production, sales and distribution were affected by the pandemic,” Md Ekramul Haque, company secretary of Bangas, told Dhaka Tribune.

Bangas's raw materials are mainly imported from China, where a coronavirus outbreak in its Hubei province in January had left large swathes of its factories as desolate as a ghost town at the beginning of the year.

When normal service resumed in China around March, the rest of the world, including Bangladesh, was in lockdown.