Troubled Portland Cement to Fire 1000 Employees

Troubled East African Portland Cement Company is set to send home more than 1000 of its employees after recording Half Year loss of more than 42 percent in the recently released financial results.

The company which has approximately 1500 employees says that the retrenchment is meant to cut down the costs of salaries that is weighing heavily on the spending of the state-owned firm.

In the recent financial results that were released, the cement manufacturer recorded 4.2 billion shillings in profits being a drop from 7.2 billion shillings that had been recorded last year at the same time.

The company attributed the drastic fall in profits on the re-evaluation gain of assets which at the moment stands at 15.7 billion shillings up from 9.5 billion shillings in the year 2015 and up from 2.2 billion shillings in the year 2014.

The Auditor General, Dr. Edward Ouko has already declared the company as being technically insolvent meant that it is operating on a negative capital.

The company according to the Auditor General has a debt of more than four billion shillings while all its assets are valued at two billion shillings meaning that if all the creditors demanded their money back today, the company will sink and never recover.

The largest shareholder with more than 25 percent is the government of Kenya through the National Treasury further casting a shadow on how government owned companies are dismally performing.

In an effort to implement the turnaround strategy, the company has given the government 2000 acres of land in exchange of 10 billion shillings, part of which will be used to pay the going staff.

The National Treasury has 25.3 percent of the shares, LafargeHolcim has 41.7 percent of the shares while the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) has 27 percent of the shares.