BNBR Posts Annual Loss After Asset Sales

PT Bakrie & Brothers, controlled bythe family of Indonesia's welfare minister, posted a record annual loss for a local public company, missing analyst estimates, after being forced to sell assets to pay off debt.
The investment company posted a net loss of 16.6 trillion rupiah ($1.4 billion) in 2008, almost twice the 8.4 trillion rupiah of sales it booked, Bakrie said in an e-mailed statement today.
The mean estimate in a Bloomberg survey of four analysts was for a profit of 2.3 trillion rupiah. Bakrie posted a 223.4 billion-rupiah profit in 2007 on 5.3 trillion rupiah of sales.
The Jakarta-based company, controlled by the family of Aburizal Bakrie, sold assets last year to help pay about $1.2 billion of debt raised by pledging the shares of PT Bumi Resources, Indonesia's biggest coal miner, and other units. The asset sales led to 17.1 trillion rupiah in losses, according to the Bakrie & Brothers statement.
The global economic meltdown and drop in stock prices in the second half of last year compelled the management to take proactive strategic step to sell its assets and resolve all its debt, Bakrie & Brothers said. This challenging process, under extremely difficult conditions, resulted in unavoidable loss on forced sale of some investments.
Bakrie & Brothers raised 51.3 trillion rupiah from selling shares and borrowing in the first half of 2008 to fund asset purchases. The company spent 48.4 trillion rupiah to buy 35 percent of Bumi and 40 percent each of oil company PT Energi Mega Persada and property Developer PT Bakrieland Development.