Even in a business suit Roopnarine Singh resembles a schoolboy only now beginning to contemplate the challenge of the CXC examinations. He says he turns eighteen on May 20 and you take his word for it only because he has come to talk about a company that he has been running for three years.
At that start of his career in business he was still a student of Hope Secondary School where he says his interest in the procurement business started. Having utilized the services of Laparkan to import personal items he recognized the profitability of offering the service to relatives and friends and eventually to an expanded market.
That was how Power Tech Logistics was born and in July 2013 the firm signed a contract with a consolidator in Miami. That set him on the road to creating a service that made him independent of another local shipper.
Roopnarine Singh
Thereafter, Roopnarine concedes, his education at Hope Secondary School, became a delicate balancing act. He lost interest in a curriculum which he says was both inadequate and unfulfilling and insists that his more than modest achievements at the CXC examinations were almost entirely down to self-motivation.
These days, he says, business is in his blood. His parents have been running a supermarket for more than ten years and he has decided to follow them in business. They are supportive.
His ambition, however, does not end there. Roopnarine belongs in the clique of the contemporary businessman who believes that education can be an undoubted asset in the pursuit of entrepreneurship. He is pursuing the Associate of Business Executives programme at Nations University. Afterwards he wants to pursue a course of studies towards customs brokership. His ultimate academic goal is to study law.
For now, however, he wants to take Power Tech Logistics as far as it can go, gradually adding improvements to his service including, most recently, technology that enables his customers to track the movement of their cargo between the company’s Miami warehouse and its destination in Georgetown.
Mindful of the competition and of the importance of securing an adequate market share he is, at least for the immediate future, focusing on customers in Berbice. He says he has discerned changes in consumer demand that include an appetite for clothing and selected food items originating in North America. It is not just the local boutiques and stores that are contributing to the growth of the shipping trade but the rising middle class who are now better positioned to marry affordability to taste. Power Tech Logistics may not yet have reached the top of the pile as far as success in the sector is concerned but its youthful CEO believes that he sees a way forward.
