For the first time in its his­to­ry the Massy Group has earned more prof­it be­fore tax (PBT) from out­side of T&T.

Chair­man Robert Bermudez, in com­ments to share­hold­ers on the group's unau­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ments for the first quar­ter of the 2016 fi­nan­cial year, said PBT from over­seas ac­count­ed for 51 per cent of Massy's over­all PBT of $211 mil­lion for the pe­ri­od.

The group's lat­est re­sults, which are post­ed on the T&T Stock Ex­change, show that PBT de­clined by 3.6 per cent and its third par­ty rev­enues de­creased by 1.6 per cent to $3.1 bil­lion com­pared to the cor­re­spond­ing pe­ri­od in 2015.

Bermudez said: "With high­er tax rates in over­seas ju­ris­dic­tions, the group's ef­fec­tive tax rate in­creased to 31 per cent ver­sus 29 per cent for the same pe­ri­od in fi­nan­cial year 2015. As a re­sult, group prof­it af­ter tax and earn­ings per share for first quar­ter 2016 de­clined by six per cent to $146 mil­lion and $1.30 per share re­spec­tive­ly."

He said the group con­tin­ues to fo­cus on op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy, waste elim­i­na­tion and in­vest­ment for growth and in the 2016 fi­nan­cial year ex­pects ad­di­tion­al rev­enue pro­duc­tion from the launch of a new Massy Stores su­per­mar­ket in Guyana, ex­pan­sion of its au­to deal­er­ship and car rental busi­ness­es in Colom­bia and full com­mer­cial launch of high speed in­ter­net and tele­vi­sion ser­vices in T&T.

"The ben­e­fit of the group's ge­o­graph­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion will con­tin­ue to as­sist the group's per­for­mance as Massy con­tin­ues to grow its op­er­a­tions in Colom­bia and Latin Amer­i­ca and as economies out­side Trinidad and To­ba­go con­tin­ue to en­joy low­er oil and oth­er com­mod­i­ty prices," Bermudez said.

He added that the group is "well po­si­tioned to weath­er the cur­rent eco­nom­ic chal­lenges" fac­ing T&T.