Listed IT firm to shift business focus this year

Publicly-listed Island Information and Technology will shift its focus towards cargo container management and integrated logistics services starting this year, laying out a plan to build an anchor container yard depot to be funded from an internal capital-raising scheme, a top company official said.

In his report to stockholders, company president Andres Lao Sr. said once the project starts operations, "we expect that this will give our corporation a big financial boost that it has been aiming for in a very long time."

Aside from the container yard depot, Lao said the company would likewise expand into commodity trading and import/export businesses considering that a number of their board directors have many business connections with businessmen abroad, particularly China and neighboring Asian countries.

"There are so many opportunities around that we see for these businesses which gave us the courage to venture into it," Lao pointed out.

He said the company would seek an increase in its capital stock from P50 million to P500 million mainly through a stock rights offer, the proceeds of which would be used exclusively for the container yard depot project.

Island plans to offer over 12.214 billion shares priced at one centavo each to stockholders, enabling them to subscribe at the rate of five shares for every two shares held on record date.

Last year, Lao said the company made a gross profit of almost P14 million, mainly from property conversion and rental. While operating income reached only about P840 thousand, this was already a significant improvement from an operating loss of P5.9 million in 2004.

The company started as Island Oil Co. in 1959 to primarily engage in oil exploration and mineral development projects. Due to incurred losses, however, management decided to shift its oil exploration activities to metal mining in the province of Isabela in the hope that it could recover previous losses, thus changing its name to Island Mining & Industrial Corp. on Jan. 1965.

Due to a slump in the highly capital-intensive mining industry, the company spun off into the information technology arena in May 2000 to ride on the upswing of the Internet and telecommunications sectors, renaming itself Island Information and Technology Inc.