Pryce bullish on hitting profit target

Pryce Corp. is confident of meeting its 2018 income target of P1.55 billion after registering robust sales of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in the first half.

The company is projected to hit nearly half of its profit target for the year, Pryce chairman and CEO Salvador Escaño said during the company’s stockholders’ meeting late Thursday.

“We projected about P1.55 billion for the entire year. But we had a good first half, we probably made P750 million,” he said.

This places the company in a good position to meet its profit guidance since historically, more than half of its revenues and income are recorded in the second half of the year, Escano added.

Pryce said it benefitted from the impact of the implementation of the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) law at the start of the year.

Initially, due to TRAIN law, the company’s volume sales were lower in January since more people bought LPG tanks ahead of the tax reform implementation.

But Escaño said the TRAIN law really favored LPG because it was only slapped with a tax of P1 per kilogram while kerosene – another competitor of cooking gas – was levied with a P3 tax per liter.

LPG sales, the group’s main product under the PryceGas brand, accounted for at least 90 percent of total revenues. The rest is from sales of industrial gases, real estate and pharmaceutical products.