September 2015 Issue Business View Caribbean

72 September 2015 - Business View Caribbean of-the-art LED lighting technology products that we’re developing and just about going into production.” Today, Caribbean LED Lighting provides its lighting so- lutions throughout Barbados as well as to countries across the Caribbean and Latin America, and as far as the United Kingdom and Canada. It has distribu- tors on St. Thomas, St. Lucia, Trinidad, St. Kitts, the Turks & Caicos, Puerto Rico, and Suriname. “Our main market is the Caribbean region and Central America, particularly the 14 countries of CARICOM. We’ve also exported to the U.S. and we have plans to open up a manufacturing facility, later this year, in Canada to serve the North American market.” The company has both commercial and residential customers. “Our initial customers were business cus- tomers – large footprint customers with large prem- ises and large electricity bills,” says Reid. “So, we started off with the big guys and then we attracted the small business-size enterprises, and then the residen- tial side. People working in those large companies saw the benefits of LED lighting in terms of improved light- ing and when the managers talked about the money they’d saved, they wanted it in their homes, too. Reid gives some examples of how his company’s prod- ucts are designed to be retrofitted into existing fixtures as well as to be much more energy-efficient: “We can replace a four-foot fluorescent tube, which consumes about 42 watts of electricity, with an 18-watt LED tube – that’s been one of our biggest sellers. An A19 light bulb replaces a 60-watt incandescent lamp with a six or seven-watt LED lamp. Halogen lamps – replacing 50-watt halogens with 5-watt LEDs - that’s where you get a lot of the 90 percent energy savings.” Caribbean LED Lighting also offers financing for companies that wish to purchase its products. “And in every single