After resuming business operations last year by moving to fisheries and tannery, Hami Industries, formerly known as Imam Button Industries, has now decided to expand its agro business. In this regard, the company has planned to lease ponds on 23.5 bighas of land in Cumilla for five years at an expense of Tk 1.76 million. If everything goes as planned, the company says it expects sales volume to grow by Tk 50 million approximately per year, according to a stock exchange filing on Sunday. Higher sales are estimated to boost annual profit by Tk 10 million, said the company.
ASM Hasib Hasan, managing director of Hami Industries, said they already have 8 bighas of land and now they are going to lease ponds to expand agro business. “We will cultivate fishes in these ponds as part of expanding our existing business as we are focusing more on agro business,” said Mr Hasan.
Imam Button is a subsidiary of Imam Group. The factory was shut in 2018 and its original owners fled the country in January 2020, after arrest warrants had been issued in cases filed by banks and financial institutions over default loans. In January 2023, the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) restructured its board. ASM Hasib Hasan took over as managing director of the company.
In August last year, Hami Industries declared an investment of Tk 14 million in agricultural projects, allocating Tk 10 million to fish and poultry farms and Tk 4 million to leasing ponds. In January this year, it also set up a shoe-making unit on its factory premises in Chattogram at a cost of Tk 115.5 million and with a production capacity of 530 pairs of shoes per day. The company cited an expected annual turnover of Tk 250 million and a profit of Tk 20 million from the tannery unit.
However, a DSE inspection team in March found that the projections were baseless. It said the projected profit of Tk 20 million per year ‘unrealistic’ given that the factory could produce only 15-20 pairs of shoes a day. Mr Hasan said he wondered how the inspection team estimated the capacity when on the day of the inspection there were around 30 workers in the factory making shoes. He, however, acknowledged that they were yet to run the tannery unit fully. About the fish business, the DSE team found no fish in the ponds. It also said the company had failed to produce any documents of its fish business. Mr Hasan claimed the company had sold fish in cash and deposited the money into a bank account.
The DSE team had not conducted the inspection properly and the company communicated the matter to the securities regulator, he said. “The inspection team didn’t enter the water or use nets, so their findings might not be accurate,” added Mr Hasan. Hami Industries, which currently trades under the “Z” category on the bourses, saw its stock price jump almost 18 per cent last week. It slid 3.5 per cent to Tk 149 per share on Sunday on the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE).
Latest financial performance
The company reported a profit of Tk 1.62 million in the nine months through March this year as opposed to a loss of Tk 4.31 million in the same period of the previous year. The company declared a 1 per cent interim cash dividend for general shareholders only, according to a stock exchange filing on Sunday. “The running project generated profits that prompted the company to declare an interim dividend,” said Mr Hasan. This is the first dividend declaration since 2010.