By our staff reporter
The sole deep sea vessel operator in Africa, Ethiopian Shipping and Logistics (ESL), reels in 13 billion birr in the first quarter of the fiscal year.
In contrast to the revenue from July to September, to that of a year ago, there has been a notable increase of a quarter.
The public enterprise, which is under the Ethiopian Investment Holding (EIH), a sovereign wealth fund, revealed in a statement at parliament’s Public Enterprises Standing Committee that its revenue increased by 26 percent during the first quarter of the 2023/24 budget year, which began in July.
Additionally, the performance has surpassed projections to attain 148 percent of the goal established for the time frame. Similarly, the logistics giant’s earnings before taxes for the specified time was over 1.9 billion birr, a 61 percent increase over the same period, from a year ago.
In terms of operation, ESL has successfully handled over 2.1 million metric tons of goods, about twice as much as it had anticipated to do so in that time frame.
In comparison to the same period last year, the amount handled by the operation has increased by 51 percent.
In the first three months over 1.2 million tonnes of cargo have been managed by the logistic company. The amount of shipping service that ESL has transported on its own, as well as slot carrier and charter, has surpassed the goal by 143 percent and by 81 percent over the previous year.
Additionally, 29,557 twenty-foot containers that were transported from Djibouti to Ethiopia were handled by ESL, the only multimodal transport provider.
On its way to achieving 112 percent of its goal, it also enlarged its foothold by one third in contrast to the same period of the 2022/2023 budget year.
The CEO of the holdings company, Abdurehman Eid Tahir, stated on Wednesday, December 6, at a meeting with the Public Enterprises Standing Committee and the EIH leadership that the firm had over eight billion birr in accrued income, which is meant to be paid by the government or public companies.
“We are working to settle the accrued amount that includes foreign currency,” he stated. ESL has set a goal of securing over 6.7 billion birr profit before tax for the budget year that ends in June 2024. This is an increase of 10.5 percent from the budget year 2022/23.
For the 2022–2023 budget year, ESL received 42.73 billion birr from its vessel, inland, freight forwarding, port, and terminal services—which was more than 90 percent of the objective from its prediction of 47.29 billion birr.
The corporation outperformed its own projections for the year by 112 percent, achieving a profit of nearly six billion birr.
The company aims to increase its capital to 90 billion birr from the existing over 20 billion birr. The CEO of ESL, Berisso Amallo, recently informed Capital that the capital increase will be presented to the board upon completion of the audit work in the near future.
When the previous budget year came to a close, it can be recalled that ESL, listed the largest vessel it had ever owned.
