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Chris De Caires, Chairman of the Private Sector Agency and World Cup Barbados Inc., during his address at a luncheon hosted by BCCI urged local businesses to actively seek out investment opportunities beyond Barbados.
"We have a history of being conservative and waiting to see what happens. We need to become more aggressive in terms of looking for business opportunities; certainly you can see a number of foreign entities that have successfully taken advantage of our markets. We need to be much more efficient at what we do," noted De Caires.
De Caires urged local business to focus more on offshore investment opportunities. He highlighted a number of local companies with substantial offshore operations, such as Goddard's Enterprises, which operates in 20 territories throughout the Caribbean and South America, the Interamericana Trading Corporation (ITC) which operates in 40 countries throughout the Caribbean, South America and Europe, and Automotive Art which operates in 18 territories.
"Sagicor is also a very good example, so you can see that it is happening, but we need more of it. From the tourism side it would be nice to see a local brand operating across the Caribbean and taking advantage of what is a very lucrative industry."
De Caires pointed out that Barbados in not a low cost producer such as China and in order to maintain local manufacturing jobs it is critical to find and exploit market niches.
"The expectation is that our existing manufacturing will probably decline into the future. If we want to maintain manufacturing jobs we need to find new business in that sector. The challenge is to find niches that we can be successfully in because the cost of production in Barbados is high and certainly to compare us to China as a competitor, there is very little we can do except to identify and get into some niche market where we can be successful."
De Caires also expressed the view that some of the more established local businesses should partner with some of the younger and less-experienced entrepreneurs, to give them the stability and the backbone infrastructure to seize opportunities in areas such as music and culture more effectively. |