In his ca­pac­i­ty as Am­bas­sador Ex­tra­or­di­nary and Plenipo­ten­tiary to four Nordic coun­tries, Garvin Nicholas re­cent­ly made an of­fi­cial vis­it to Swe­den where he dis­cussed the lat­est ad­vances in tech­nol­o­gy and op­por­tu­ni­ties for com­merce with sev­er­al busi­ness heads.

On Oc­to­ber 10, Nicholas' pro­gramme be­gan with a tour of the Er­ic­s­son Stu­dio where he was treat­ed to a dis­play of cut­ting-edge smart tech­nol­o­gy from ap­pli­ca­tion to con­trol of arable farm­ing, to smart homes and aes­thet­ic and en­er­gy ef­fi­cient cell-sites. A meet­ing with Ulf Pehrs­son, vice pres­i­dent, gov­ern­ment and in­dus­try re­la­tions and Ul­rik Lindqvist, sales di­rec­tor, Latin Amer­i­ca, fol­lowed.

Er­ic­s­son has sig­nif­i­cant ties to T&T, from the pro­vi­sion of mo­bile phones to 4G tech­nol­o­gy. Pehrs­son iden­ti­fied some ar­eas of op­por­tu­ni­ty which in­clud­ed lib­er­al­i­sa­tion of new mo­bile ap­pli­ca­tions such as e-Gov and Mo­bile Mon­ey; per­mit en­try of Mo­bile Vir­tu­al Net­work Op­er­a­tor ser­vices to boost com­pe­ti­tion and al­low re­farm­ing of the spec­trum bands to en­able mo­bile broad­band growth. As a re­sult of these dis­cus­sions, Nicholas was in­vit­ed to meet with the Er­ic­s­son team in T&T to re­view fur­ther ar­eas for col­lab­o­ra­tion.

The am­bas­sador al­so met with He­le­na Bar­rantes Carls­son, project man­ag­er, busi­ness, Swe­den. Many of Swe­den's ma­jor in­dus­tries align with T&T's de­vel­op­ment fo­cus, such as ICT, health­care and life sci­ences, cre­ative in­dus­tries, safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty, in­dus­tri­al equip­ment, en­er­gy and en­vi­ron­men­tal tech­nol­o­gy, trans­port sys­tems and food. Nicholas and Carls­son dis­cussed the ease of do­ing busi­ness and the ben­e­fits to be de­rived in set­ting-up op­er­a­tions in T&T.

Nicholas was then host­ed to lunch by Claes Ham­mar, am­bas­sador for the Caribbean\ res­i­dent in Swe­den and Jonas Lov�n, di­rec­tor of the Amer­i­c­as De­part­ment, Min­istry for For­eign Af­fairs.

Nicholas' tour of the Nordic re­gion cul­mi­nat­ed in a meet­ing with Ni­na Hornewall, coun­try man­ag­er, Swe­den and Takis Fil­ip­popou­los, com­mer­cial di­rec­tor of Apol­lo. The Apol­lo rep­re­sen­ta­tives ex­pressed great an­tic­i­pa­tion for the com­mence­ment of a two-week char­ter ser­vice to To­ba­go in De­cem­ber. Since launch­ing the ser­vice, sales have been en­cour­ag­ing. Nicholas vowed to li­aise di­rect­ly with stake­hold­ers in To­ba­go to im­press up­on them the im­por­tance of con­sis­tent ser­vice de­liv­ery to the suc­cess of this ser­vice.