Wilcon Depot Inc., the retailer of home improvement and construction materials, said it will have to scale back store openings this year as the lockdowns delayed construction work on some of its sites.
Lorraine Belo-Cincochan, Wilcon president, said the company plans to open two more stores by the end of this year. This will raise the number of its stores to 63 by end-2020.
“We are now at 61 stores. We opened one last Friday in Cabuyao, Laguna. And we still plan to open 2 more by the end of this year, the last quarter of the year. We’re lacking two more. We will be pushing that to next year, and we will target to open 9 stores [in 2021] to make up for the lost months this year,” Belo-Cincochan said in an online press briefing after the company’s stockholders’ meeting on Monday.
“Our target has been revised to 63 this year, because as we all know, the lockdown just really made everybody stop doing anything, especially construction. So construction was really at a standstill, all borders were very restricted. And we lost time there. And as such, we cannot open the stores that we had planned to open the number of stores that we plan to open. Despite that we are still open.”
Rosemarie B. Ong, the company’s COO, said the company has between 8 to 10 new sites of new Wilcon stores in various stages of construction even before the lockdowns were implemented.
With the planned store openings for the year, Wilcon will close 2020 with 520,000 square meters of selling space, she said.
“For us, maybe you would see the schedule the two stores to open by the last quarter of next year,” she said.
Wilcon’s income in the first quarter fell 6 percent to P328 million from the previous year’s P484 million after most of its stores were closed during lockdown in the country.
“Wilcon Depot was not spared from closure when the enhanced community quarantine [ECQ] was imposed by the Philippine government over Luzon on March 17. Under the ECQ, our line of business was excluded from the ‘essentials’ category. We closed all our 44 branches, which accounted for 84 percent of our net sales in 2020 pre-ECQ,” Belo-Cincochan said.
Net sales fell 2.5 percent to P5.59 billion from last year’s P5.73 billion.
“It was unfortunate that we had to close because we were doing so well pre-ECQ but of course the well-being and health of everyone are paramount,” she said.
Wilcon said the main factor that pushed net income downward was the 20-percent increase in operating expenses year-on-year, to P1.43 billion due to the hike in lease and manpower related expenses.