A little over ten days ago a privately owned British company, Edrington, acquired a majority shareholding in Brugal the leading rum producer in the Dominican Republic and one of the largest international rum brands after Havana Club and Bacardi. At around the same time Angostura of Trinidad completed its takeover bid for Lascelles de Mercardo, the parent company of J Wray and Nephew, the owner of Jamaica’s Appleton rum brand.
The two deals – possibly as much as US$1,200M in the case of Brugal and around US$850M in the case of Lascelles – were based on the premise that there are globally competitive Caribbean brands.
Tellingly the markets envisaged for these Caribbean products go beyond the traditional. Edrington is looking to develop sales in Russia and Eastern Europe. CL, Angostura’s parent company, intends using its global distribution network CL World Brands, to develop sales of Jamaican rum across the world.
Both developments could well presage a still more significant opportunity if the region’s tourism industry and the brand ‘Caribbean’ that it is promoting, can piggy-back on the many tens of millions of dollars of marketing money that the spirits industry will deploy in penetrating new markets for Caribbean products.
What these business ventures – and others like them undertaken by Jamaica Producers, Grace Kennedy, Sandals, Superclubs, Goddard Enterprises, and Demerara Distillers – convey, is a message that is sometimes not understood in the region. There is absolutely no reason why the region’s products and services sector and by extension governments and institutions cannot be globally competitive.
With value added agricultural products like rum, with its tourism, its music industry, its financial services sector and even its globally praised institutions like the East Caribbean Central Bank or the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (CRNM), the region can demonstrate success and that smallness is an irrelevance.
On January 29, Jamaica’s Prime Minister Bruce Golding spoke very frankly about this in the context of the soon to be signed Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Europe. He accused critics of the agreement of failing to escape the psychological shackles of slavery. Addressing a conference on capital markets he observed that there were two types of critic of the agreement: those who think the region can exist on its own and those who think the world owes the region something. “There are persons,” he said, “who believe that the preference we have enjoyed
