Yesterday, Sofia BT filed its preliminary 2008 results disclosing an almost 7% reduction in sales revenues to BGN 82.8m. Production sales alone declined 9.5% to BGN 73m. Profitability suffered considerably as EBITDA margin almost halved from 10.2% to 5.6% over the year. Rising costs of energy have pushed materials costs up, while at the same time - due to competitive pressures and the excise hike of the beginning of 2008 - the company hasn’t been able to pass that increase onto the end consumer, and had, in fact, to cut on its margins to remain competitive. The bottom line shrank 12-fold to BGN 425k.