Palm oil producer Austindo Nusantara Jaya (ANJ) said that it posted a 28.6 percent rise in net income in the first nine months of 2020 compared to the same period last year as well turned a $1.44 million profit.
“We also registered quite a significant rise in our income, from previously $92 million to $118.4 million for the first three quarters of 2020,” ANJ Finance Director Lucas Kurniawan told an online press conference that followed a company public exposed on Monday (23/11.)
Kurniawan said that in the same period, the company managed to turn a $5.9 million loss in the first nine months of 2019 into a $1.44 million profit in the same period this year.
Its EBITDA for the first three quarters of this year also rose by 58.9 percent to $26.66 million compared to the first three quarters in 2019.
However, because of the many problems that arose from the COVID-19 Pandemic, the company’s capital expenditure in the first nine months this year only stood at $33.43 million from the $60.2 million budgeted for this year.
The capex figure was also 37.7 percent lower than in the same period last year.
“What we need to underline here is that there has been no postponing of our work plan,” he said, adding that the focus of the capital expenditure this year remained the same as in the previous year, that is on strategic expenditures to support the company’s income and performance.
ANJ also managed to produce 553,698 tons of Fresh Fruit Bunches (FFBs) in the first nine months of 2020 compared to 542,156 tons in the same period last year.
“In the three first quarters of 2020, compared to the first three quarters in 2018, we registered a growth in Fresh Fruit Bunch production, by around 2.1 percent,” Kurniawan said.
Kurniawan said that contributing to the higher production was the company’s plantation in West Papua which had begun commercial production in the first quarter of the year.
Its Crude Palm Oil (CPO), however, went down slightly by 2.6 percent compared to the same nine months last year, to 175,367 tons as of the long dry season in 2019 lowered productivity and also the lower volume of supply from smallholders.
ANJ President Director Istini T. Siddharta, speaking at the same occasion, said that up to September 2020, 98.6 percent of the company’s revenues came from palm oil while the remaining 1.6 percent came from its sago, edamame and biogas power plant.
Kurniawan said that regarding the use of capital expenditure, the focus remained on optimizing the productivity of plantations and factories to achieve FFB production and maximum extraction rates. $20.6 million, or about 62 percent of the $33.4 million capital expenditure spent so far went to the maintenance of young crops, the build infrastructure and the construction of a mill in Wet Papua.
Siddharta said that for the non-palm oil sectors, the company also followed the same focus since last year, that is to focus on boosting the extraction rate and yield of sago and edamame.
“For Sago, next year we can target production to reach three times that of this year,”Siddharta said, adding that for edamame, production next year was expected to be double this year’s.
ANJ operates six commercially producing oil palm plantations and five mills in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua. Its oil palm plantation in South Sumatra has not yet entered commercial production. It also operates a sago plantation and processing factory in West Papua and an edamame plant in East Java as well as a biogas power plant in Belitung.