Parramatta. 'Difficult year' ahead

The Queensland-based Wide Bay Australia Ltd, one of Australia’s larger non-bank Approved Deposit Taking institutions, which has its one NSW branch in Parramatta, said 2009 was clearly going to be a difficult year, where the focus would be on tight credit quality and containment of costs, particularly wholesale funding and with areas such as arrears. The company experienced strong growth in profit for the last six months with an after tax profit of $9.585 million – an increase of 16.5 per cent compared to the corresponding period of 2007/2008.