Not a one-off

iCreate profits climbed 428 per cent in the first quarter of its current financial year, January to March, with CEO tyrone Wilson saying the performance is “not a one-off” but is due to strategies implemented to turn the business around. revenues grew strongly in the first quarter going up by 451 per cent to $46 million.

Wilson, commenting on the results, told the Jamaica Observer, “We expect this type of performance to continue. It’s not a one-off revenue bump. We have outlined at our AGM in January 6 [2022] that we have a two-to-one financial strategy where we are aiming to have US$2 million in revenues and US$1 million in profits and that is what we are focused on.” The two-to-one strategy is expected to be realised this year.

He added that the revenues are being driven by a focus on training, production and e-commerce after the company was restructured to survive the onslaught of a downturn induced by the novel coronavirus pandemic.

During the height of the pandemic icreate shuttered its Montego Bay, St James campus and consolidated its operations in Kingston while moving its training online.

“The $46 million in revenues we [are] seeing is due to a more diverse revenue mix from the three different areas like training, production and e-commerce,” Wilson added. He said the company is also looking to build on the real estate partnership that was announced for St Ann.

The company also recently acquired e-commerce platform Getpaid.

“We also have another acquisition that we are looking to tie-up and announce soon,” Wilson told the Caribbean Business report.

icreate faced a rough start after listing in 2019, posting huge losses. “We had our first AGM in 2020 where I kinda outline to the shareholders a plan to turn around the company which meant diversifying away from just training and business-to-consumer (B2C) markets. We diversify where we acquire the e-commerce company Getpaid, we started going back to content production and for the institute itself, we started pushing a lot more corporate training partnerships, meaning we try to move away from getting revenues from training individuals one-on-one or in a classroom to working with more established corporate entities to train their staff or corporate entities that wanted to pay to train individuals in the market.”

icreate currently has three major long-term training partnerships, but Wilson said while training will remain the core part of the business, he wants to create a creative conglomerate.

“It’s just kinda providing a better opportunity for the business to grow through diverse sources as opposed to just training.

“We are on a plan right now to really take our place in the digital and creative economy. We have a good brand, we have good feedback from the people that we have been working with, especially the students that we have trained over the years, and this type of performance that you are seeing in the first quarter [January to March], our plan is to continue that for the rest of the year,” he said.

As for the Reggae Sunsplash brand, Wilson said there is no plan to host the music festival this year.

“We [are] looking at Sunsplash more for 2023. We [are] not planning to push it right now.”

“It would take a lot of work to