Business View Caribbean | July 2022

39 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN VOLUME 9, ISSUE 7 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 have much better sales and profits. But that has now been tampered by logistical problems. “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.” 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 JAMA I CA MANUFACTURERS & EXPORTERS ASSOC I AT ION 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. “As for The JMEA, we have about 20 people on staff and we did a lot of online seminars and courses to help our members innovate and look at how they do business. We’re visiting our members again in person now and we’re also