News & Events

Central Global new board to fortify segment market, positive earnings turnaround

KUALA LUMPUR: Central Global Bhd (CGB), which has appointed new board members in February this year, is fortifying the company's position as a leading producer of self-adhesive label stocks and tapes in Malaysia.

Executive chairman Datuk Faisal Zelman, who was appointed to the board on February 26, 2021, said the new board will focus efforts on growing the construction business, which was loss-making in the financial year ended December 31, 2020 (FY20).

"We aim to reinforce our leading position in the self-adhesive label stock and tapes business.

"We have onboard new talent and formulating new ideas as we foresee lots of potential in this industry," he said.

"Our manufacturing operations is good to run on its own, it's operating full-fledge. What we want to do is streamline the production operations, buy new machinery, save costs where we can and expand to new markets," he said in a statement today.
Manufacturing contributed 43 per cent of CGB's revenue in FY20.

CGB's self-adhesive label stocks and tapes, which cater mainly for professional auto spray painting, packing, advertising applications, general labelling and identification, are exported to Australia, New Zealand, USA, China, Thailand, India, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Brunei, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Sri Lanka and Europe.

According to the company's fourth quarter (Q4) FY20 financial results released in late February 2021, CGB will be increasing prices of products to counter the rise in material cost such as paper, rubber and chemicals going into the first quarter of 2021.

As for the construction business, CGB's current projects in Penang would last for another two years.

"We are proceeding cautiously with construction as it's a competitive industry but we do see huge potential," Faisal said.

The company's construction business order book is currently at RM42 million.

"We are aiming to increase the order book and we are working on some deals that will be announced this year.

"Our focus is mostly constructing for property developers although we are also looking at civil infrastructure," he added.

CGB expects this year to be better than last year.

"We are still cautious as this is the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

"However, the manufacturing business is steady and we are looking at a potential pipeline of construction projects coming our way, which is reason enough to expect this year to be better than last year," he said.

Source: NST