Be­ing an ex­port­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny in­volves a lot of risk and toil, but it be­comes re­ward­ing when the busi­ness can now be seen as a for­eign ex­change earn­er.

The Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian spoke to sev­er­al big ex­porters about their jour­ney to be­com­ing for­eign ex­change earn­ers at the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) awards din­ner last Tues­day.

Nicholas Lok Jack, chair­man of As­so­ci­at­ed Brands In­dus­tries Ltd (ABIL), said from the ear­ly years of ex­is­tence, the founder of the group, his fa­ther Arthur, saw the op­por­tu­ni­ty and im­por­tance of the ex­port mar­ket and be­came for­eign ex­change earn­ers a short while af­ter.

ABIL man­u­fac­tures choco­lates, bis­cuits, and ce­re­als. It cel­e­brat­ed its 50th an­niver­sary years ear­li­er this month and is in sev­er­al re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets.

Lok Jack said ex­port­ing may sound nice and sexy, but it is a tough road.

“It is trav­el­ing all over in­to dif­fer­ent places where you don’t know the lan­guage or the ge­o­gra­phies. Some­times, like right now, we are mak­ing a heavy push in­to Latin Amer­i­ca.”

How­ev­er, the busi­ness­man not­ed that be­ing a net for­eign ex­change earn­er does not mean the com­pa­ny will al­ways be flush with forex.

“It means that there are cycli­cal times in our busi­ness. Some­times you have cash, some­times you don’t. But in the main, we have enough to cov­er our raw ma­te­r­i­al sup­plies. Our sales are prob­a­bly 67 per cent ex­port at this stage.

“Some­times we sell back in­to the mar­ket. I think that we are con­tribut­ing bet­ter to the econ­o­my be­cause we are sell­ing for­eign ex­change back. We con­tin­ue to press hard against our ex­port mar­kets.”

Lol Jack high­light­ed that a trip is sched­uled to Tai­wan for next year to ex­plore op­por­tu­ni­ties in that mar­ket.

Asked about Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert’s state­ment last Sun­day dur­ing a blog­ger live that while man­u­fac­tur­ing is play­ing its role in ramp­ing up ex­ports it still has a long way to go, the ex­ec­u­tive said he agreed with the state­ments.

“An econ­o­my of our size, an en­er­gy-based econ­o­my, it’s such a dom­i­nant fac­tor that you can’t stop the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion process ei­ther. We have to take a long-term view and make sure our man­u­fac­tur­ers are well-fa­cil­i­tat­ed,” he men­tioned.

On whether the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor can be­come the main for­eign ex­change earn­er as op­posed to T&T de­pend­ing on oil and gas, Lok Jack said “I be­lieve there’s no sil­ver bul­let. We have to build all the dif­fer­ent as­pects of for­eign ex­change to a ca­pac­i­ty. The coun­try’s tourism prod­ucts need to be looked at. How do we en­cour­age in­vest­ment in tourism?”

Look­ing at House of An­gos­tu­ra and how its lega­cy start­ed in the ex­port busi­ness, the com­pa­ny’s chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer, Ian Forbes said the rum and bit­ters man­u­fac­tur­er, which has been in ex­is­tence for 200 years, start­ed ex­port­ing its prod­ucts from ear­ly as the founders saw the vol­umes be­ing cre­at­ed were be­yond what T&T need­ed.

Forbes not­ed that the com­pa­ny ex­ports bit­ters to up to 170 mar­kets and rums which are in 60 mar­kets.

“There’s the op­por­tu­ni­ty to grow that fur­ther be­cause while we have done a lot with bit­ters, there is still so much more we can do with rum. The rum mar­ket glob­al­ly, es­pe­cial­ly the mar­ket for pre­mi­um rums, and aged rums, is mas­sive. It’s worth bil­lions of US dol­lars.”

Asked how much of An­gos­tu­ra’s rev­enue comes from ex­ports, Forbes said 40 per cent.

Giv­ing ad­vice to up­com­ing ex­port man­u­fac­tur­ers, Forbes said the first thing is the com­pa­ny must be con­fi­dent and fo­cus on its strat­e­gy to pen­e­trate new mar­kets.

“We need to be con­fi­dent about what we can cre­ate. We can cre­ate sol­id brands. You’re see­ing it in the mar­ket­place, you’re see­ing it in the su­per­mar­kets,” he added.

An­gos­tu­ra re­ceived the 2023 In­no­va­tor of the Year at the TTMA func­tion.

The win­ner of the 2023 small busi­ness prize at the TTMA func­tion was Chris­tle Ltd, a com­pa­ny whose man­u­fac­tures in­clude house­hold clean­ing prod­ucts.

Chris­tle deputy man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Jonathan Gar­cia said the chem­i­cal com­pa­ny start­ed ex­port­ing over a year and a half ago, as a re­sult of the forex crunch.

“We need­ed it so bad­ly to pur­chase the raw ma­te­ri­als on the out­side. Spe­cial men­tion to Ex­im­bank that as­sists us, but we al­so need much more,” Gar­cia said.

He point­ed out that ex­port­ing is not easy as there are de­lays to deal with.

Fur­ther, he said the com­pa­ny is in ten re­gion­al coun­tries, and pen­e­trat­ing in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets is a pri­or­i­ty for 2025.

Da­ta sent by the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try to Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian said ex­ports from the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor have demon­strat­ed re­mark­able per­for­mance ac­count­ing for over 90 per cent of to­tal non-en­er­gy ex­ports an­nu­al­ly over the last five years (2019-2023).

The min­istry said to quan­ti­fy this, be­tween 2019 and 2023, over $72.4 bil­lion worth of T&T’s non-en­er­gy prod­ucts were ex­port­ed with $68.8 bil­lion gen­er­at­ed from the non-en­er­gy man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor alone.