Pres­i­dent of In­vesTT, Rac­quel Moses, says the na­tion's in­vest­ment pro­mo­tion agency is hop­ing to use next week's mis­sion to Bei­jing, Shang­hai to en­cour­age com­pa­nies in that coun­try to in­vest in T&T's non-en­er­gy sec­tor.

In­vesTT is lead­ing a del­e­ga­tion of more than 30 en­tre­pre­neurs and busi­ness ex­ec­u­tives who are go­ing to Chi­na to in­ves­ti­gate the pos­si­bil­i­ty of open­ing up new mar­kets for T&T goods or for new sup­pli­ers for im­port­ed in­puts.

While in Chi­na, Moses says she will be look­ing to lure Chi­nese com­pa­nies to in­vest in T&T.

"We are hop­ing to sign sev­er­al mem­o­ran­da of un­der­stand­ing with some Chi­nese firms re­gard­ing in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties in T&T."

The main thrust of the in­vest­ment pro­mo­tion agency in Chi­na will be to pro­mote in­vest­ment in a com­bined so­lar park, which Moses es­ti­mates could at­tract up to US$1.8 bil­lion in new in­vest­ment.

Moses says the pro­pos­al is for the co-lo­ca­tion of four dis­crete yet con­joined man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties, whose ul­ti­mate out­put would be so­lar pan­els for ex­port to the re­gions and the hemi­sphere.

The fa­cil­i­ties are a poly­sil­i­con plant, a met­al­lur­gi­cal sil­i­con plant, a , a float glass plant as well as a pho­to­volta­ic plant.

Moses said the plants will be lo­cat­ed next to each oth­er and will pro­vide val­ue-adding in­puts along the so­lar pan­el pro­duc­tion chain. She said that one-third of the out­put of the poly­sil­i­con plant will be used in the met­al­lur­gi­cal sil­i­con plant and one-third of the out­put of that plant goes to the pho­to­volta­ic plant along with the float glass plant to man­u­fac­ture so­lar pan­els.

Po­ten­tial­ly, In­vesTT is look­ing for four sep­a­rate in­vestors who will be re­spon­si­ble for the dis­crete plants and while she is not dis­count­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of T&T in­vest­ment, the so­lar pan­el com­plex is like­ly to re­quire in­vestors with in­dus­try ex­pe­ri­ence, es­tab­lished mar­kets who are look­ing to ex­pand.

In­vesTT has al­ready de­ter­mined that T&T pro­vides a unique propo­si­tion for com­pa­nies in the so­lar sec­tor and its analy­sis has in­di­cat­ed that the coun­try is in the top sec­ond per­centile in terms of cost of pro­duc­tion for each of the four plants.

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