The passage of Hurricane Beryl and a week-long global outage of MoneyGram International Inc were significant enough to send Lasco Financial Services Limited (LASF) from a net profit of $37.19 million to a net loss of $8.64 million in the second quarter (July-September). ).

The remittance player released its second-quarter report on Friday, noting that the passage of Hurricane Beryl disrupted its ability to serve customers on Jamaica’s south coast, where roads were damaged and electricity access reduced. However, the company managed to get through the difficult period and appreciated its sub-agents serving these neighborhoods.

As we continue to recover from the impact of the hurricane, we are further impacted by events that led MoneyGram International to proactively take its systems offline to contain and remediate unauthorized activity. The complete suspension of transactions for five days significantly affected our earnings from money transfer, foreign exchange and card services. Since the restoration of services, transactions have gradually improved but not normalized,” Jacinth Hall-Tracey, managing director of Lasco Financial, said in the quarterly report.

Remittances account for 43 percent of Lasco Financial’s revenue, which totaled $2.20 billion as of March 2024. Another 34 percent of the company’s revenues come from its cambio business and 14 percent from its microcredit subsidiary.

These outages from the hurricane and MoneyGram were responsible for a five percent drop in revenue to $546.28 million. Despite the limited increase in administrative expenses, Lasco Financials’ selling and promotional expenses increased six percent to $204.71 million as it spent more to promote its recently launched MoneyGram Direct-to-Card service. The combination of these events caused operating profits to drop 61 percent, from $71.01 million to $27.16 million. A slight increase in finance cost of $20.76 million and a relatively unchanged tax expense of $15.05 million were responsible for the loss in the quarter.

Provisional data from the Bank of Jamaica for August shows remittance inflows increased by 3.6 percent to US$299.60 million; This is an improvement over July, when inflows for the month dropped 4.7 percent from $302.80 million to $288.70 million. In the January-August period, remittance inflows decreased by 0.64 percent to 1.94 billion US dollars.

For the full six months, Lasco Financial’s revenue fell six percent to $1.08 billion, and operating profit fell 43 percent to $79.50 million. Despite lower financing costs and tax expenses, net profit fell 84 percent from $56 million to $9.15 million.

Total assets fell seven percent to $4.15 billion; The company’s loans and other receivables balance was $1.53 billion, while its cash balances were $1.08 billion, and after accounting for the bank overdraft, net cash was $845.81 million. As the company reduced its debts and bank overdraft account, total liabilities decreased by 14 percent to 1.87 billion dollars, while equity capital closed the period at 2.28 billion dollars.

Lasco closed the underperforming Montego Bay branch as it sought to transform the ship; This will lead to an improvement in the company’s earnings in the coming months. This is done in conjunction with cost-cutting measures and growth-promoting services.

Lasco closed at $1.76 on Tuesday, resulting in an 8 percent decline in the stock’s market value at $2.25 billion. Mayberry Jamaican Equities has purchased an additional 2,466,864 shares since March, increasing its holding to 267,179,109 shares, for a 20.8697 percent stake. The Mayberry Managed Clients account sold 174,539 shares, reducing its stake to 8,957,963 shares; For JN Pooled Pension Local Equity Fund, JN Fund Managers Limited became the sixth largest shareholder with 12,286,087 shares. Human Resources Manager Nordel Leach-Murphy now owns 1,171,112 shares, although he did not own them at the beginning of the new financial year.