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Wilcon eyes P600M quarterly income, return to pre-pandemic earnings in 2022


Home improvement retailer Wilcon Depot Inc. aims to maintain its record earnings reported in the first quarter and hopes to return to pre-pandemic figures by 2022.

In a virtual briefing on Monday, Wilcon Vice President for Investor Relations Mary Jean Alger said the company targets to sustain its net income at the P600-million level moving forward.

Wilcon reported an 84% climb in its first-quarter net income to P604.41 million from P276 million the same quarter last year, as sales grew 19.4%.

"Definitely, we're targeting and we're working hard to maintain that P600 million per quarter bottom line," Alger told reporters.

Should this be realized, the company will report an annual net income hovering around P2.4 billion this 2021.

She noted, however, that there may be a hit in the second quarter due to the reimposition of quarantine restrictions in Metro Manila, where most of its stores are located.

During the second quarter this year, the NCR Plus bubble — Metro Manila, Cavite, Laguna, Rizal, and Bulacan — was placed under the strictest enhanced community quarantine or ECQ from March 29 to April 11, then modified ECQ from April 12 to May 14, and the general community quarantine from May 15 to June 30.

Despite the anticipated slip in the second quarter, Alger said the company hopes to return to pre-pandemic earnings by 2022.

"We were actually hoping that we will reach that by the end of this year, but we cut so to speak from the last week of March right, when the cases again in Metro Manila, in the NCR Plus, surged, so again we experienced a slowdown," she said.

"Fortunately this year, we were not asked to close our stores, so we remained operational, but then of course traffic dropped all that because of the consequent restrictions that were imposed," Alger explained.

Shares in Wilcon closed Monday at P18.30 apiece, unchanged from Friday's finish. —KBK, GMA News

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