Lanka Tiles Ltd (LTL), owners of Parquet Ceylon Ltd, a flooring product company, which has made losses upto last year, will give Parquet ‘some more time’ to show good profits, while looking at how best they could restructure the company, according to a top official.

Mahendra Jayasekera, Managing Director of Parquet told The Sunday Times FT that Parquet’s market is growing now and ‘reports’ that it was being sold are not true. “Selling is not on the cards right now,” he said. But he said that if an attractive offer to sell Parquet comes, they will consider it, but it is a long term plan. “We might look at it, but we want to develop it and sell. Our staff is also under pressure to sell this product. I constantly ask them whether it is worth carrying on or whether we should close it down, but they disagree. What they say is that since we have done all the groundwork, it should not be shut down, because someone else will take the market presence and the product awareness that we have created. I would think that we will have to give Parquet another year, at least,” he pointed out.

He said the sales are on the upward trend and was hopeful that the company will make money this year. "If you take the profit before interest, operationally there was an improvement in the company, but we are hopeful it will make money this year," he said.

He explained that when they took the company over same years ago, Parquet was dependant only on one UK buyer to sell the capacity of the factory. "He was buying at a very good price as far as he was concerned and we were not making money even when we ran the factory at full capacity. We had a near zero market presence here and were exporting 100 percent of our output. But today we are exporting only about 30 to 40 percent of the output and the balance is sold in the local market," he noted.