The T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce has an­nounced that Ramps Lo­gis­tics Lim­it­ed has been award­ed “In­ter­na­tion­al­ly Known...T&T Owned Com­pa­ny of the Year” of the 2020 Cham­pi­ons of Busi­ness Awards.

In a re­lease, the Cham­ber in­di­cat­ed that the cat­e­go­ry recog­nis­es a com­pa­ny for its achieve­ments in tak­ing in­cred­i­ble steps to move their busi­ness from a lo­cal op­er­a­tion to an In­ter­na­tion­al play­er.

Ramps Lo­gis­tics Lim­it­ed is one of the re­gion’s lead­ing lo­gis­tics providers. Formed in 1985 by Ram­nar­ine Ram­per­sad as a cus­toms bro­ker­age provider, the com­pa­ny em­ployed just 1 per­son. By 2000, the com­pa­ny be­gan of­fer­ing freight for­ward­ing ser­vices, with an in­creased em­ploy­ee base of 12 and part­ner­ing with ma­jor ship­ping lines to bring car­go to and from Trinidad.

In 2013, now pro­vid­ing these ser­vices to sev­er­al large down­stream en­er­gy com­pa­nies lo­cal­ly, Ramps made a ma­jor de­ci­sion to ex­pand with­in the re­gion. Guyana was iden­ti­fied due to its growth po­ten­tial for trade and lo­gis­tics.

The Cham­ber’s state­ment dis­closed: “At that time Guyana’s en­er­gy sec­tor had not yet been iden­ti­fied, but be­ing in Guyana worked pos­i­tive­ly for Ramps when they se­cured a con­tract for lo­gis­tics and shore­base man­age­ment with Exxon­Mo­bil, who was prepar­ing for ex­plorato­ry drilling (which proved to be huge­ly suc­cess­ful).”

Sub­se­quent­ly, the com­pa­ny won a ten­der to pro­vide in­te­grat­ed lo­gis­tics to Exxon­Mo­bil, go­ing up against in­ter­na­tion­al providers who typ­i­cal­ly would sub­con­tract af­ter se­cur­ing a ten­der.

Ac­cord­ing to the Cham­ber, the track record of the com­pa­ny then spoke for it­self, and Ramps can boast of hav­ing cap­tured con­tracts from oth­er ma­jor en­er­gy gi­ants such as Schlum­berg­er and Hal­libur­ton, among oth­ers.

In 2017, hav­ing en­tered the Suri­name mar­ket, Ramps se­cured a con­tract from Tul­low that was 90 per cent and 10 per cent in Suri­name for an off­shore well in Suri­name. More­over, the state­ment in­di­cat­ed that Ramps Lo­gis­tics al­so has op­er­a­tions in Mex­i­co and will soon be en­gag­ing the Colom­bian mar­ket.

The Cham­ber said: “Now an es­tab­lished re­gion­al op­er­a­tor, Ramps has set its sights on ex­pand­ing be­yond the re­gion and giv­en their care­ful strate­gic plan­ning, suc­cess is sure to fol­low for this home-grown com­pa­ny.”

The fi­nale of the Cham­pi­ons of Busi­ness Awards cer­e­mo­ny will be held on No­vem­ber 20, 2020 at 8.00pm. The event will be broad­cast live on tele­vi­sion on CNC3 and live streamed when the pre­sen­ta­tion will be made to Ramps Lo­gis­tics and oth­er award re­cip­i­ents.

— Ky­ron Reg­is