March 1 (SeeNews) - Romanian aluminium producer Alro Group achieved a net profit of 329 million lei ($81 million/ 67 million euro) last year, compared to a 67 million lei loss in 2019, the group's flagship company Alro [BSE:ALR] said.
The positive result is due to the recognition of the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) compensation scheme for 2019 and 2020 and also due to measures the group has implemented to optimize production and inventories, Alro said in a statement filed with the Bucharest Stock Exchange, BVB, on Friday.
The preliminary financial figures are unaudited and do not include the results of the impairment test on investments in subsidiaries, Alro noted.
The group posted a turnover of 2.5 billion lei at the end of 2020, down by an annual 9%, as primary aluminium sales decreased by 7% year-on-year, while processed aluminium sales dropped by 8%.
"The international business environment has faced an unprecedented crisis, without any short-term or medium-term visibility and with changing circumstances from one day to the next. Despite this unfavourable context, Alro Group managed to maintain all its operations running, worked together with its business partners and succeeded to keep sales and production at good levels," Alro chairman of the board of directors, Marian Nastase, said.
While the group limited its investments to crucial projects and implemented an anti-crisis programme, it continued to follow its long-term strategy to focus on high and very high value-added products, and this helped the group to partially offset the decrease in demand registered in the first part of 2020, Nastase explained.
Throughout 2020, the group implemented a plan focused at the operational level to reduce inventories, to decrease the acquisition prices in line with new reality, to reschedule the new investments, all with the aim to preserve cash within the company.
Alro Group is part of global, vertically-integrated primary and processed aluminium producer Vimetco N.V., which has operations in Romania, China and Sierra Leone.
Alro's shares were changing hands 0.74% lower at 2.68 lei by 1534 CET on Monday on the BVB.
($=0.8306 euro)