Pelikan International Corporation Berhad released its financial results for the first quarter of 2023 delivering a revenue growth of 18.1% to RM236.7 million, profits also improved significantly as profit before tax for the quarter amounted to RM9.2 million, overturning a loss before tax of RM3.5 million in 1QFY2022.
The better performance is attributable to strong sales development in the Latin American region which recorded an increase in turnover of over 75% compared to the same period last year. Since 2022 after the pandemic, this region has been significantly strong and has even surpassed pre-covid sales levels.
The other major markets such as Germany continued to be strong in the current quarter. As the Group prepares for the Back to School season beginning in June, Pelikan expects positive development of deliveries coming through its major customers in its key channels.
Whilst the other European countries, especially Eastern European countries are faced with high inflation which hampers the demand and overall consumption, the sales development of this region still showed resilience as overall turnover is still at similar levels as per last year.
The strategy of the Group to focus more on the school segment over the years as opposed to the office segment also paved the way for the Group to be more elastic to the economic trend as school products are still a high necessity spending for parents for their school going kids despite high inflation and economic difficulties. In addition, the high-end fine writing instruments is more of a global product and a bigger part is sold within the Asian market which is now coming back to normalcy post covid period, in particular, China, Japan, and Korea.
Since the completion of the Group’s reorganisation exercise in 2015 to streamline its stationery business under its German subsidiary Pelikan Group Gmbh and divestment of non-core and loss-making businesses, the Group has continued to show year-on-year profits.
In the financial year ended 31 December 2021, the Group posted a profit after tax of RM93.1 million and made a special dividend of RM120.6 million or 20 sen per share. Due to the positive development of its business, there have been several expressions of interest from strategic investors in its assets and business. The Company aims to be able to realise transactions that are in the best interests of shareholders and achieve valuations above its net asset value.
