The Board of Investments (BoI) has approved the grant of incentives to the new project under agribusiness.

URC will house its newest facility within the Robina Farms Complex in Bulacan. The facility will have a capacity to produce 46.4 million pieces of eggs per year. It would also have culls and cockerels as by-products.

The project will start commercial operations in October this year and will generate some 25 new jobs.

The eggs that will be produced will not be hatched but will be sold directly through the Robinson’s supermarkets, other authorized distributors, or for the group’s internal requirements.

The company will import parent stocks, usually day-old chicks to produce the chickens on a sustainable basis.

URC produces and markets a wide array of snacks, candies, chocolates, cakes, coffee, beverage, noodles and pasta, and several joint venture products with Nissin’s and Hunt’s.

In a recent disclosure, the company said its unaudited net income fell 93.5 percent to P234 million in the first quarter — from October to December 2007 — of its current fiscal year, which ends in September 2008.

URC corporate information officer Bach Sebastian said the decline was due to foreign exchange losses arising from the peso’s strengthening, higher taxes, and marked-to-market losses in the company’s bond holdings due to falling bond prices worldwide.

In October-December quarter, URC posted one-time gains from the sale of its shares in sister firm Robinsons Land Corp., Sebastian said.

Sebastian said core earnings — operating profit after equity earnings, net financing and other charges — grew 15.4 percent to P886 million in the quarter from P768 million in October-December 2006.

Net sales in the quarter rose 18.1 percent yearonyear to P10.86 billion from P9.2 billion.

Net sales of the company’s branded consumer foods group (BCFG), representing its local and international businesses, rose 16.9 percent year-on-year to P7.95 billion from P6.8 billion.

There was a 20.1-percent rise in net sales in BCFG domestic operations, driven largely by strong performance of the snack foods business, which posted a 21.5-percent growth in sales value, and of the and beverage business, with a 24.4-percent rise in sales value.

All categories in the snack food business posted double-digit growth, with bakery products and biscuits delivering the highest sales increase, URC said.

Strong coffee sales fueled the growth of the beverage business, it said.

BCFG international sales grew 8.5 percent year-on-year to P2.02 billion, buoyed by revenue growth in Thailand and Vietnam. International sales rose 25 percent to $ 47 million, URC said.

In the packaging division, net sales climbed 18.4 percent year-on-year in the first quarter from P308 million, with increased sales volume, it added.

The company’s agro-industrial group recorded a net sales jump of 10.4 percent to P1.49 billion from P1.34 billion.