Exide scrapes through 2020

In a year it should have expected losses, the car battery company managed a small profit

Somehow, Exide did it. It managed to turn around two years of consecutive losses and scrape through with just a sliver of a profit in the year 2021. It seems improbable that the company should have done so, considering it sells, of all things, car batteries; and car sales took a tumble in the year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

And yet, take a look at its most recent figures, in a notice issued to the Pakistan Stock Exchange on June 30. The company’s financial year ends on March 31. In the year 2020, sales stood at Rs8.7 billion, while net loss stood at Rs558 million. But just one year later, net sales increased to Rs11.7 billion, and the company managed to achieve a profit of Rs84 million.

To put another way, that is the highest sales achieved in 2018, and is in fact even higher than sales netted in 2016. And sure, the size of the profit isn’t great: the company had comfortably crossed the Rs80 million threshold all the way back in 2007. But the company had stumbled along the way, falling from a high