The Guyana Sugar Corporation’s (GuySuCo) marketing team has recaptured the Antiguan market, according to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sasenarine Singh.
Singh made this announcement during a press conference held at the Albion Estate training building last week, noting, “These things that were left for dead we were able to recapture that.”
He had previously announced that GuySuCo was also able to recapture the Grenada market and extend the St Vincent, and Trinidad markets. He stressed, “We want to win all the small islands, [and] Jamaica,” which is high on the list of potential markets.
According to the CEO, they were also able to get “US$30 more per metric ton out of Trinidad,” which he said was the biggest market internationally for the sugar corporation.
Meanwhile, Singh disclosed that GuySuCo is looking for members of the private sector who are willing to become distributors of its sugar. He encouraged interested persons to send their Expressions of Interest to marketing@Guysuco.com so that their proposals can be evaluated at the earliest, so as to “engage you in a partnership to help us to do more business.”
He also disclosed that he was recently contacted by the Rupununi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (RCCI) which expressed an interest in buying GuySuCo’s sugar for resale into the Brazilian market.
He informed that through the Guyana/Brazil arrangement, some duty-free access to the Brazilian market was gained.
For those persons who may wonder why Brazil, one of the largest producers of sugar, would themselves purchase sugar from Guyana, he explained that those who would want to purchase sugar are closer to Guyana than Brazil’s sugar producing areas. “… they have to fly it in with a plane and so forth, so it makes more cost effective sense that we sell sugar to them.”
Singh also stated that the RCCI President had told him that based on the market intelligence, some Brazilians “… love our brown sugar rather than their white sugar, it’s a preference.”
And with regard to Suriname and the recent reopening of the Guyana-Suriname ferry service, Singh said that they are anxiously hoping that cross-border trade in that area rapidly restarts. “Suriname is a very important customer of GuySuCo but because of the lock down it really interfered with our business so we want to get back into that trade.”
The CEO said he was recently in conversation with a member of the private sector who ships rice to Jamaica, “so we are asking him well why not take a container or two of sugar, and he is exploring it actively right now with the supermarkets in Jamaica. So this is real, this push is real.”
