B.B. Holdings is nation’s most profitable company

Which company in Belize is the nation’s most profitable? If you guessed B.T.L. you’d be wrong. If you guessed B.E.L. you’d be warmer but still wrong. The correct answer is B.B. Holdings. That’s the parent company of the Belize Bank, and its latest annual report is showing a twenty-six point eight percent increase in net income to forty-five point four million U.S. dollars. That’s a shade under ninety-one million Belize. According to the report, the Belize Bank dominates the country’s banking industry, boasting a forty-five percent market share of all loans. The company’s financial services profits come from three entities: The Belize Bank Limited operating domestically, Belize Bank International working in the offshore sector; and Belize Bank Turks and Caicos, which serves domestic and international clients from that British colony near the Bahamas. B.B. Holdings also owns a twenty-four percent stake in NUMAR, a Costa Rican based producer of edible oils. Even if you subtract the nine point seven million U.S. credited from NUMAR’s profits and the ten point eight attributable to the Turks and Caicos operation, you still wind up with a purely local profit of forty-nine point eight million Belize dollars, far ahead of B.E.L.’s twenty-six point one and B.T.L.’s twenty-three point one million.