Qatar National Cement Company (Q.P.S.C.) (QNCD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to Qatar National Cement Conference Call. Please note that this call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. Now I would like to hand the call over to Phibion. You may begin.

Thank you,[ Joyce ]. Good afternoon to you all. I would like to welcome you all to the Qatar National Cement Earnings Conference Call for the first half of the year and the second quarter of 2026. On the call today from the QNCD management, we have engineer Essa Mohammed Ali Kaldari, the Chief Executive Officer. We also have Wael Zuhair Taher Oukal, the Chief Financial Officer. And lastly, we have Saqib Parvez, the Head of Finance and IR Officer. And as usual, the management team will first give us an overview of what transpired during the last quarter, and then we have a Q&A session immediately afterwards. Let me now turn over the call to engineer Essa to begin. Over to you, sir.

Great. Thank you. [Foreign Language]. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to join us for the second quarter conference call. This meeting will cover the following topics: the financial performance, investor presentation, and at the end, we'll have the question-and-answer. So let's start with the financial performance of the first half year. The company has posted a revenue of QAR 203 million in the first half year of 2026 compared to QAR 187 million in 2025 first half year. This presents an increase of 9% half-to-half basis. The revenue has increased by 10%, mainly due to an increase in washed sand and slag volumes. Gross profit has increased by 6% compared to last year. The overall net profit of QAR 55,427 million compared to QAR 65,306 million in 2025, a slight increased from last year. The shareholder equity as of June 30, 2026, amounted to QAR 2.9 billion compared to QAR 2.99 billion at the end of previous year. This reflects the robust of our financial strength. We have already completed distributing dividend of QAR 143 million in the last 6 months. And any of the investor has any query or question, you can contact [ Edaa ] for their dividend payment. Now let me pass the presentation to my colleague, Saqib. He will take you through the financial performance. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Briefly, I will provide some overview of the income statement for the 6 months 30 June 2026. And the revenue for the 6 months is QAR 203 million compared to QAR 187 million, is an increase of 9%. The cost of sales has increased by 9%. Gross profit has increased by 6%. So other income has slightly decreased and selling distribution has increased 33%. G&A has slightly increased by 3% and the finance cost has slightly increased by 20% due to mostly the lease liabilities. The net profit has slightly increased by 0.2%. So let's move to the other part like for the financial statements. We have a liquidity ratios of current ratio currently stay at [ 6.28x ] compared to 6.74x. And [ quick ] ratio has reached 3.73x compared to 4.34x. And mostly, this is due to the distribution of dividend and plus the increase in the investment. Thank you so much. If you have any questions, please, you're welcome to open the question session.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Adnan Muqeem from Al Rayan Investment.

I have a question that your revenues increased because your volume increase, like, you are producing more, but I haven't seen improvement in the gross margin level. What I think in first quarter, you have mentioned that when you will start the production, the gross margin will increase. So we haven't seen that improvement yet.

Thanks for the question. See, as you can see that there is an increase in the GP by 6%. So now this is the first year, we have started the production. We will gradually see the improvement in the coming quarters and the coming time [indiscernible].

Okay. And the other thing like, you have some deposits that could you mention like what's the rate on those deposits right now?

Deposits, like, see, this is the [indiscernible] normal market rate what we are getting in. That's it. So in addition to this, that we can refer back to the financial statements like what is the information available there is that is the [indiscernible].

Other thing would be like what is the current utilization rate and what is the target?