A steadily growing fabric maker whose yearly sales have more than doubled in five years and that pays a regular cash dividend — but it leans heavily on borrowed money and is now branching into solar power.

Paramount Textile PLC is a Bangladeshi textile company. In simple terms, it makes woven fabric and yarn — the raw cloth that garment factories cut and stitch into clothes for export. It has been trading on the Dhaka Stock Exchange since 2013, so it now has more than a decade of public track record, and it sits in the exchange's top 'A' category.

It has become a fairly sizeable business. Yearly sales reached 1226 crore taka in 2025, up from 502.1 crore taka in 2021 — more than double in five years. What it owns in total (its assets) has grown to 3446 crore taka, and it is built on 17.9 crore shares with 179.1 crore taka of paid-up capital.

More recently the company has started reaching beyond cloth. Together with a related company it won approval from the national power board to develop four solar power projects with a combined capacity of 295 megawatts, and it has arranged to sell power to a related solar company. So over time Paramount is trying to grow from a pure textile maker into a wider textile-and-energy group.

The engine of the business is simple: Paramount makes fabric and yarn and sells it to Bangladesh's garment exporters. Those factories are its customers, so the company rides on the health of the country's huge clothing-export industry. When garment orders are strong and factories need more cloth, Paramount sells more.

The sales record shows that engine has been running well. Revenue rose in every one of the last five years — 502.1 crore taka in 2021, then 661.6, 946.4, 1117 and 1226 crore taka in 2025. That steady climb has come from adding capacity and selling more, rather than from one lucky year.

The company is now trying to add a second engine. Alongside cloth, it is building toward solar-power generation — the 295-megawatt projects it has won approval for — which, if completed, could give it a new and steadier stream of income over time. It has also been reorganising how it holds some of its group investments. These moves widen the business but also mean it is spending and borrowing to grow.

The company is clearly profitable, and profit has grown over the medium term. Net profit went from 66.2 crore taka in 2021 to 76.0, then jumped to 122.4 crore taka in 2023, eased to 107.8 in 2024, and recovered to 116.1 crore taka in 2025. Over the whole 2021-to-2025 span, profit is up about 75% and sales are up about 144%.

But look at profit per share and a caution appears. Profit for each share was 4.27 taka in 2021, rose to a peak of 7.51 taka in 2023, then came down to 6.62 and 6.48 taka in the last two years. Across the five years per-share profit is up about 52% — real growth, but less than the growth in total profit, and clearly below the 2023 high.

Two things explain the gap. First, the company has handed out bonus (stock) shares, so the same profit is now split across more shares, which lowers profit per share. Second, and more important, sales more than doubled while profit grew only three-quarters — meaning each 100 taka of sales is now keeping a bit less as final profit. As the company borrowed to expand, higher interest and running costs ate into the margin. So the pattern to remember is strong sales growth, but profit not fully keeping pace lately.

On the cash side, the picture is encouraging. The actual cash the business produces from its operations has grown strongly — 79.7 crore taka in 2021, then 57.2, 95.5, 125.7, and 185.7 crore taka in 2025. Cash in hand at the end of 2025 was 72.6 crore taka. And the value of what it owns, measured per share, has risen steadily every year from 27.24 taka to 43.89 taka. A company that keeps turning sales into real cash is in a healthier position than one that only reports paper profit.

The worry is debt. Measured on its yearly accounts, the company owed about 83 taka for every 100 taka of the owners' money at the end of 2025 (a debt-to-equity level of 0.83), with total debt of 655.4 crore taka against 786.1 crore taka of owners' money. That ratio has actually improved from a 2022 peak of 1.14, which is a good sign.

But a broader look is less comforting. The company's total borrowings stand at about 2553 crore taka, while the profit it has piled up over the years (its reserves) is about 553 crore taka — so borrowings are more than four times those reserves. This is the one clear red flag in the data: a heavily geared balance sheet. The strong, rising cash flow helps it service that debt today, but a weak year for sales or a jump in interest costs would put real pressure on it.

Paramount has a steady habit of paying a dividend, and it has done so for years. The recent record: for 2021 it paid 20% cash plus a 5% bonus share, then 10% cash in both 2022 and 2023, then 5% cash plus a 10% bonus in 2024, and 12% cash for 2025. That makes it a consistent dividend payer. The latest 12% cash dividend works out to 1.2 taka per share, since the face value of each share is 10 taka.

The payout looks comfortably safe. The company earned 6.48 taka of profit per share and paid out just 1.2 taka of it as cash — a small fraction. That leaves the large majority of profit inside the business to fund growth, and the strong operating cash flow covers the dividend easily.

The flip side is that this is not a big-income stock. The cash dividend has bounced around in size, even dipping to 5% cash in 2024, and the company clearly prefers to reinvest for expansion rather than pay out most of its earnings. So it rewards shareholders reliably but modestly — income is a bonus here, not the main event.

Paramount's real advantage is scale and consistency. With 1226 crore taka of yearly sales, it is one of the larger listed textile companies, and its sales have risen every year for five years — steadier and faster growth than many rivals in the same trade. Size and a dependable growth record matter in textiles, where scale helps win big garment-factory orders.

It also uses the owners' money well. In 2025 it earned 116.1 crore taka of profit on 786.1 crore taka of owners' money — a healthier return than several of the textile peers in the data, whose returns on their owners' money are noticeably lower. That said, textile is a low-margin business: the 116.1 crore taka of profit came out of 1226 crore taka of sales, so only a thin slice of each sale becomes final profit — which is normal for the industry.

The final point is alignment. The founding sponsors and directors own 60.95% of the company, so the people running it have a very large personal stake in how it does — their interests sit close to those of ordinary shareholders. What Paramount does not have is a strong brand or a product only it can make; fabric competes on price and reliability worldwide. So its edge is scale, efficiency and steady execution rather than a protected niche.

• Sales have more than doubled in five years, from 502.1 to 1226 crore taka — steady, real demand for its fabric rather than a one-off jump.
• Cash generation is strong and improving, with operating cash flow rising to 185.7 crore taka in 2025 — the money that funds both growth and the dividend.
• A new solar-power arm is being built (295 megawatts of projects approved), which could add a fresh, steadier income stream if completed.
• The dividend is reliable and safe, paying only 1.2 taka out of 6.48 taka per-share profit — leaving plenty of room and even scope to raise it over time.
• Owners are heavily invested, with sponsors and directors holding 60.95% — management's own money is on the line alongside shareholders'.

• It carries heavy borrowings — total loans of about 2553 crore taka against reserves of about 553 crore taka — so rising interest costs directly eat into profit, and a bad year would strain the balance sheet.
• Per-share profit has slipped from its peak, from 7.51 taka in 2023 to 6.48 taka in 2025, showing margins have been squeezed even while sales rose.
• Bonus shares dilute each share — total profit grew about 75% over five years but per-share profit only about 52%, because profit is now split across more shares.
• Textile is a thin-margin, cyclical, competitive export business — it is exposed to swings in global clothing demand, cotton and energy prices, and price competition it cannot fully control.
• The solar expansion is capital-heavy and unproven for this company — building power projects adds funding needs and execution risk far outside its core cloth business.

In plain terms, Paramount Textile is a growing, mid-to-large fabric maker with fast-rising sales, dependable and improving cash flow, a small but consistent yearly dividend, and a new solar-power arm it is starting to build. The core business works, and management — which owns most of the company — is clearly playing for long-term growth.

It fits a patient, long-term investor who wants an industrial growth company and is happy to take a modest dividend along the way. It is a weaker fit for someone who needs a large regular income from dividends, or who wants a very safe company with little debt, because Paramount deliberately reinvests and borrows to grow.

The main things to keep watching are the debt load — total borrowings are large next to the profit it has saved up — and whether per-share profit can start climbing again after slipping from its 2023 peak. If sales growth keeps turning into real cash, the debt stays manageable, and the solar bet pays off, the growth story holds together; if margins stay squeezed or borrowing costs rise, the risks in this share are real. This is educational information, not a recommendation to buy or sell.