Trade Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon is hop­ing the par­tic­i­pants of the vir­tu­al event en­ti­tled “Wel­come to the World of Ex­port” will help con­tin­ue the mo­men­tum gen­er­at­ed by the non-en­er­gy sec­tor in the past few years.

The min­is­ter once again not­ed the growth in ex­ports in the coun­try since the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and urged the par­tic­i­pants to make the most of the event host­ed by the Youth Busi­ness T&T and the Ex­im­Bank of T&T.

“To the en­tre­pre­neurs here to­day, I com­mend you for mak­ing the in­vest­ment of time, not on­ly in your busi­ness but al­so in mak­ing a com­mit­ment to con­tribute to the growth of our econ­o­my. It is to be not­ed that T&T ex­pe­ri­enced an es­ti­mat­ed 69 per cent in­crease in ex­ports, mak­ing it the best per­former in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean (LAC) in 2022.

“It is sig­nif­i­cant to note that, ac­cord­ing to da­ta from the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice, in 2022, to­tal ex­ports were es­ti­mat­ed at $83.2 bil­lion, which far sur­pass­es the ex­port growth in 2019 (pre-pan­dem­ic) val­ued at $48.6 bil­lion, a 71 per cent in­crease in ex­ports,” she said, “This suc­cess was fur­ther am­pli­fied by a 12 per cent in­crease in non-en­er­gy ex­ports from $15.5 bil­lion in 2021 to $17.5 bil­lion in 2022.”

The min­is­ter was heart­ened that over 100 en­tre­pre­neurs had tak­en part in Wel­come to the World of Ex­port ini­tia­tive, which in­clud­ed ses­sions on de­vel­op­ing ex­port po­ten­tial, en­try in­to new mar­kets and the im­por­tance of ef­fec­tive mar­ket re­search.

The fi­nal ses­sion ex­am­ined the play­ers in the ex­port mar­ket.

“I must un­der­score that be­fore you even look at the ex­port mar­ket you must ask your­self the ques­tion: do I have a prod­uct or ser­vice that the world wants? Do peo­ple want the prod­ucts I have to of­fer or rather how can I tai­lor my of­fer­ings to meet the needs of the mar­ket?” Gopee-Scoon asked the group, as she urged them to use the TTBi­zLink plat­form, the trade and busi­ness in­for­ma­tion por­tal for T&T to en­hance their abil­i­ty to con­duct mar­ket re­search.

She al­so urged them to take ad­van­tage of oth­er re­cent­ly launched gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives, in­clud­ing a $24 mil­lion sup­port pro­gramme for Small and Medi­um-Sized En­ter­pris­es which was an­nounced last week to fur­ther bol­ster en­tre­pre­neur­ial growth in the coun­try.

The new SME grant pro­gramme will be ad­min­is­tered by Ned­co and it is ex­pect­ed that over 1,000 SMEs will ben­e­fit, the min­is­ter said.

“With re­gard to ac­cess to fi­nance, there are sev­er­al grants in­clu­sive of our grant fund fa­cil­i­ty, steel­pan man­u­fac­tur­ing grant, and the re­search and de­vel­op­ment grant.

“This fund­ing has en­abled sev­er­al of the ben­e­fi­cia­ries to pen­e­trate new ex­port mar­kets, in­clud­ing Cari­com coun­tries, Cu­ba and the Unit­ed King­dom. Sev­er­al of the more re­cent projects fund­ed by the Grant Fund Fa­cil­i­ty are ex­pect­ed to fa­cil­i­tate ex­ports to non-tra­di­tion­al mar­kets such as Slo­va­kia, Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, South Ko­rea, Ger­many, Be­lize, Colom­bia, Cos­ta Ri­ca and Chile and it means that you too can ex­port to these ter­ri­to­ries,” said Gopee-Scoon.