In the good years, MDC UM took up to eight booths to ex­hib­it its fur­ni­ture at the Trade and In­vest­ment Con­ven­tion. The eco­nom­ic down­turn has changed that. "Eight booths, as you can imag­ine, can get ex­pen­sive, year af­ter year," said An­tho­ny Farah, busi­ness de­vel­op­ment and mar­ket­ing man­ag­er. Farah, who has a de­gree in busi­ness ad­min­is­tra­tion, said while TIC is a good mar­ket­ing op­por­tu­ni­ty, he has in­struc­tions to keep costs rea­son­able.

"We stayed at a mod­est four booths this year. We're go­ing to try a slight­ly dif­fer­ent lay­out and see if we can pull it off with the num­ber of booths. "I would say im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter the show and dur­ing the show, we tend to get a lot of, what we call, re­tail busi­ness of small to medi­um pur­chas­es: $5,000-$10,000. You can buy a chair that costs $5,000 or 20,000," said Farah, in an in­ter­view at the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA), Barataria, last week Wednes­day.

Out­fit­ting the Wa­ter­front Tow­ers

MDC UM's biggest con­tract so far has been in­stalling fur­ni­ture in the Wa­ter­front Tow­ers next to the Hy­att Re­gency Trinidad ho­tel. Ac­cord­ing to the Web site, http://tt.linkedin.com/pub/an­tho­ny-farah/14/758/925, Farah wrote: "I have been in­volved in the of­fice fur­ni­ture in­dus­try for over six years now and have re­cent­ly bro­ken the an­nu­al sales record for my cur­rent em­ploy­er (and with the help of the HNI cor­po­ra­tion), by clos­ing of the Wa­ter­front Tow­ers fur­ni­ture con­tract in T&T. "I al­so planned the lo­gis­tics and ran the in­stal­la­tion (10 months) of 52 floors of of­fice fur­ni­ture, meet­ing rooms and com­mer­cial kitchens, us­ing most­ly lo­cal labour (spe­cial thanks to OM­NI and MDI of the USA)."

Farah was re­luc­tant to re­lease the cost of that con­tract.

"You get a lot of fol­low-up busi­ness from a project that size," he said. "That's ac­tu­al­ly the largest project com­plet­ed in the Caribbean, so we're very proud of it." Farah said plan­ning, de­sign work, pur­chas­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing time for a big project can take a few months to a year. MDC UM out­fit­ted both Wa­ter­front Tow­ers. He de­clined to give the size of that con­tract. Faraj said the com­pa­ny used the out­fit­ting of the Wa­ter­front Tow­ers as an ad­ver­tis­ing point at the 2009 TIC to let peo­ple know lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers' ca­pa­bil­i­ty, that a lo­cal sup­pli­er can ac­tu­al­ly out­fit a project of in­ter­na­tion­al scope.

"In that par­tic­u­lar project, we com­pet­ed against all oth­er firms that were out­side of T&T. We com­pet­ed against in­ter­na­tion­al firms in the Unit­ed States, Guatemala and Mex­i­co. We pre­vailed in the ac­tu­al project and we com­plet­ed it on time," Farah said. What gave MDC UM the edge? "Ex­pe­ri­ence. We're al­so, un­like most of the sup­pli­ers in our in­dus­try, a full-fledged man­u­fac­tur­er. That ca­pa­bil­i­ty, when we brought in the con­struc­tion firms and so on, we took them up to our man­u­fac­tur­ers in the Unit­ed States so they can see the qual­i­ty of prod­uct that we part­ner with. We al­so took them out to the fac­to­ry. The fac­to­ry is some­thing most peo­ple don't see. Most peo­ple nev­er see the dirty end of it.

Read­ing the mar­ket

Farah said MDC UM had an­tic­i­pat­ed a slow 2010, but sur­pris­ing­ly saw ac­tiv­i­ty in the mar­ket that was un­ex­pect­ed. "We ex­pect­ed the first six months to be slow, to start crank­ing up by mid-year, and a slight­ly bet­ter year go­ing in­to 2011, which is what most econ­o­mists are not por­tray­ing. "Our in­dus­try tails the con­struc­tion sec­tor. We are not in the lead­ing edge of the con­struc­tion sec­tor, so we're not go­ing to see the slow­downs that the whole con­struc­tion sec­tor is an­tic­i­pat­ing. "Some­time in 2011, we may start to see a slow­down in ma­jor projects. You have projects that are clos­ing off, that have been clos­ing off for the past year," Farah said. He said some of those projects were linked with the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (Ude­cott), and MDC UM is not cer­tain about the di­rec­tion of those projects, giv­en the con­tro­ver­sy over Ude­cott's for­mer chair­man, Calder Hart. He said the com­pa­ny has not seen much ac­tiv­i­ty re­gard­ing Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus.

Ex­ports

Farah said about 30 per cent of MDC UM's busi­ness goes to: Bar­ba­dos, Ja­maica, St Lu­cia, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines. "A lot of the small­er is­lands do not have ded­i­cat­ed fur­ni­ture deal­ers." He said Ja­maica, sur­pris­ing­ly, is one of the com­pa­ny's small­er mar­kets be­cause it has a lot of lo­cal com­pe­ti­tion. "It's a very big is­land, but big means that they have a lot of busi­ness peo­ple out there, peo­ple who buy and sell. To pen­e­trate the mar­ket, you need a lot more hu­man re­source on the ground."