Fontana senior management team
Following IC Insider.com article, pointing to errors in the Fontana prospectus issued to the public on Thursday, December 6, the company subsequently corrected the errors and uploaded the corrected prospectus on the Jamaica Stock Exchange website.
“Please note that Fontana Limited attaches hereto its unaudited financial information for the period ended 30 September 2018. This information is updated from the financial information that is presented in the prospectus of the Company dated Thursday, 6 December 2018. The effect of the update is a revision to the Statement of Cash Flows where the profit before taxation and depreciation charges were inadvertently omitted. The Company also updated a typo to the Share Price of the Company from $2 to $1.88 on page 14 of the prospectus”, the company stated in a release on the JSE website.
The directors and management advised that the pricing error arose from a change in the original planned price of $2 that to $1.88 but the price, the price stated in the body of the document was overlooked. The error in the cash flow arose from the links to the cash flow from the work sheet did not copy over the figures for profit and depreciation when the final document was completed and no one picked up the omission prior to the publication of the error.
The directors at their investors briefing on Monday also addressed the matter of the sharp jump in inventories and the increase in the company’s first quarter profit over the prior year as well as the pace at which they will commence further expansion after the opening of the Waterloo Road branch in 2019. Inventories for the Christmas season were imported earlier than in 2017 the directors stated. Apparently, the movement in the exchange rate of the Jamaica dollar played a role as well as some concerns regarding the pricing of supplies out of China. The financial controller, Judale Smith indicated that the gross profit margins are usually 36 percent but it had fallen in the 2017 first quarter as they had to source some goods at higher prices that affected the margins, as such the 2018 figures better reflect what the out turn should be like.
