Thailand’s largest industrial conglomerate Siam Cement Group (SCG) trimmed its 2020 revenue estimate due to the coronavirus pandemic. The company now expects the full-year revenue to be 9% lower than THB437 billion posted in 2019. Previously, SCG forecast this year’s revenue to decline by 6% from last year. The company believes that the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic would extend into 2021, hurting the global economy and making it difficult to come up with a new business plan.
CEO Roongrote Rangsiyopash said the company’s work on the new plan consumed more time because it is hard to precisely assess the pandemic impact faced by the company. However, Rangsiyopash said the new business plan for 2021 would likely be available within the last quarter of this year.
In the first nine months of 2020, SCG generated revenue of THB303 billion ($9.7 billion), falling by 9% from a year earlier. The decline was mostly attributed to lower sales prices of chemical products due to a decrease in crude prices. The company posted a profit of THB26.1 billion ($837.1 million), increasing by 5% from the January-September period last year. In the July-September quarter, SCG’s revenue stood at THB101 billion ($3.2 billion), decreasing by 9% from the same quarter last year. Third-quarter profit rose 57% year-on-year to THB9.74 billion ($312.4 million).
SCG said the closure of Mawlamyine Cement Ltd (MCL) plant in Myanmar, would not affect its cement-building material division. It reveals that the $5.4-billion Long Son Petrochemicals complex in Vietnam is 97% complete. The company also said its Map Ta Phut olefins plant (MOC) in Rayong was under 45-day maintenance in April-June 2020 to increase its annual capacity by around 350,000 tons through debottlenecking.
