In last week’s column I had indicated that GuySuCo’s Report for 2009 stated that there was no payment of dividends for that year, as in many previous years. To my mind this statement reveals management’s resignation to the indefinite continuation of unprofitability. As the data in Table 1 and graph below show, while GuySuCo had earned a consistent profit after tax between 1991 and 1999, for the decade of the 2000s this situation was strongly reversed.
Indeed, in the 1991-1999 period profit after taxation rose from $44 million in 1991 to $1.3 billion in 1999. For seven years of the subsequent decade