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After nine years of profit-making, forty-nine state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are set to count massive losses in the outgoing fiscal year (FY), 2022-23.
According to the Bangladesh Economic Review-2023 released last Thursday, the net loss of those companies and corporations has been estimated at Tk 137.41 billion (provisional figure).
It said the SOEs had been making profits after FY13 when the net loss of the public entities was around Tk 26.05 billion.
Since then, the margin of their net profits kept rising and reached as high as Tk 151.60 billion in FY21.
After that, the public entities started witnessing the flip side of it as their net profit fell massively to reach Tk 17.08 billion in FY22.
The balance sheet of the SOEs suddenly turned too grim mainly due to worst performance of the Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC) and the Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDC) whose loss-making rose manifold in FY23.
Among the enterprises, the BPC suffered the highest Tk 70.87-billion losses, which was over 257 per cent higher than the last fiscal's Tk 19.83 billion.
The BPDC came second with its loss estimated at Tk 69.69 billion in this outgoing fiscal. In FY22, its total net loss was Tk 32.43 billion.
The Bangladesh Sugar and Food Industries Corporation (BSFIC) become third with suffering a financial loss of Tk 6.78 billion followed by the Bangladesh Jute Mills Corporation (BJMC) of Tk 2.48 billion.
Five others also joined the ranks of loss-makers. They were BBC, BSCIC, BIWTC, BPRC and BTMC.
On the other hand, the Bangladesh Bridges Authority (BBA) made the highest profit of Tk 28.43 billion followed by the Chittagong Port Authority (Tk 13.92 billion) and the Bangladesh Oil, Gas and Mineral Corporation (Tk 4.72 billion).
When contacted, Policy Exchange of Bangladesh chairman Dr M Masrur Reaz said the prices of petroleum products and LNG in the global market increased significantly last year because of the volatility on global macro-economic fronts following the Russia-Ukraine War.
"And it heavily impacted our economy. That's probably the reason behind the massive losses of BPC and BPDC as they had to pay the additional costs in importing petroleum products and gas to produce power," he added.
Questioning the necessity of having too many SOEs in the country, Dr Reaz said the government should skip the mindset of doing business while the track record of the SOEs was not good for the country.
"I think the government should privatise the SOEs to avert any further stress in the form of spending public money to make the entities alive," he observed.