Business View Carribean l January 2023

41 42 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 1 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 1 “In early 2021, we started to see a massive increase in the cost of trade out of the Far East and that was bad enough. But the last quarter of 2021 up to now, we are seeing a shortage of containers to the Caribbean much worse than it has been in the past. It may be that shipping lines are looking at where they can make more money and diverting more of their available shipping space to the North American market, at the expense of some of the smaller Caribbean islands. And in general where they have to go first to the U.S. and then come to Jamaica. “We’re seeing that change starting to affect not only importers but manufacturers, where you’re trying to source raw materials and packaging materials and it’s not coming through. We had a serious shortage of items such as glass bottles, aluminum cans, tops for bottles, cardboard boxes, and it’s showing up in terms of reduced sales because your fulfillment level is in decline. That and the increase in trade has put a serious dampening effect on manufacturers.” of GDP– but over the past 30 years, for various reasons, it has declined to about 8 % of GDP. We want to see that trend reverse. In particular, we think it can be reversed by increasing export.” BVC: How is the supply chain disruption impacting manufacturers? Mahfood: “In 2020 when the impact of COVID was really significant and there was a massive downturn in the purchasing of manufactured items, companies had to change their method of operation in order to increase productivity and efficiency. In 2021, we started to see the benefits of those efforts. Manufacturers were returning to a higher level of profitability than they had experienced pre-COVID, without any increase in sales. That was a good sign, and the outlook for 2022 with the return of schools and the opening up of the entertainment industry indicated that companies would benefit from their cost reduction exercises and would much better sales and profits. But that has now been tampered by logistical problems. JAMA I CA MANUFACTURERS & EXPORTERS ASSOC I AT ION BVC: How did the pandemic change the way Jamaican businesses communicate? Mahfood: “As a small island, if you had export customers it meant that you wouldn’t be visiting your customers for a couple years, you wouldn’t be attending trade shows, and any internal meetings were done by Zoom and other means. In Jamaica, a lot of the financial institutions and government agencies went to work-at-home models. So it represented a big change in the way we operated. “Now we’re beginning the process of having physical meetings and visiting customers again, but there were some benefits to the changes that were made. You now can see a lot more customers, more regularly, through technology and we hope that will make companies more effective when they continue using that technology for marketing and selling. That, along with an improvement in their ability to physically see their customers.