Ceylon Tobacco Company Plc (CTC), the local unit of British American Tobacco, posted a consolidated after tax profit of Rs.8.2 billion for the financial year ended December 31, 2012 up 24.4 percent from a year ago.

As a result, the earnings per share grew from Rs.35.08 to end the year at Rs.43.65.

The company has achieved this profit as a result of aggressive cost savings initiatives and one-off benefits such as exchange gains realized from the utilization of US dollar deposits and savings realized from employee benefit expenses due to restructuring activities carried out in 2011.

The company also enjoyed a higher interest income which increased to Rs.646 million, up from Rs.390 million as a result of rate increases and a change in investment strategy with greater focus on longerterm deposits in comparison to 2011.

Meanwhile during the year, the gross revenue and the net revenue grew by a modest 8.0 percent and 12.8 percent to Rs.82.8 billion and Rs. 19.2 billion respectively. This is despite the overall volumes declining by 4.3 percent over the previous year after two years of growth.

The Q4 results of the group too demonstrated the after tax profit rising by 1.6 percent Year-on-Year (YoY) to Rs. 1.98 billion and the revenue rising by 5.5 percent to Rs. 20.6 billion.

Whilst the mainstream segment volumes were down by 5 percent, the premium segment recorded growth of 45 percent driven by its innovative variant Dunhill SWITCH, which was launched in December 2011. According to the company, SWITCH now accounts for 48 percent of the Dunhill business.

Meanwhile CTC’s exports volumes continued to grow, recording an upturn of 182 percent over the previous year, increasing total export revenues from Rs. 44 million to Rs. 128 million.

Final dividend of Rs. 6.50 per share and four interim dividends totalling Rs. 37.10 less tax & a special dividend of Rs.1.55 less tax have been declared and paid already for the year 2012 for which the group distributed Rs. 8.3 billion.

Meanwhile the writ application filed in the court of appeal in November 2012 by CTC challenging the Tobacco Products (Labelling and Packaging) Regulations No. 01 of 2012 published by the Minister of Health in the Gazette Extraordinary No. 1770/15 dated 8th August 2012 is due to take up for hearing again on the February 19.

Furthermore the company informed, the Sustainable Agricultural Development Program (SADP), a corporate social responsibility initiative to alleviate poverty & improve livelihoods now covers 11,864 families enriching the lives of 44, 309 island wide.

Meanwhile the Rs.157 billion valued company with 84.13 stake held by British American Tobacco contributed Rs.71.2 billion to the government in 2012 in the form of Excise, Income Tax and other levies. This is an increase of Rs.5.1 billion over the previous year.

This is against the company contributing as much as Rs.66 billion in 2011 as state revenue with an increase of Rs. 9.5 billion over the preceding year.

In 2012 a total of 56 million illegal sticks at a market value of over Rs. 1 billion were confiscated through 1,433 raids. In 2011, a total of 657 raids were conducted by authorities with over 76 million sticks being confiscated, valued at Rs.1.2 billion.

The upward price revision in October 2011 coupled with foreign interest helped to swell the market value of the company to over Rs.100 billion last February to overtake then number three and four Carson (Rs.89.5 billion) and Buckit (Rs.71.8 billion) to become the second most valued company after JKH (Rs. 196 billion) which is still maintained to date.