Demerara Distillers Ltd has announced its intention to invest US$100 million over the next five years in “several new areas to support the existing business,” even as it moves in the direction of “expanding the range of its current activities and products,” the company’s long-serving senior executive and current Executive Chairman, Komal Samaroo disclosed in New York on Wednesday.
The announcement came during Samaroo’s address to a forum organized by the US-based Guyana-America Chamber of Commerce, the most recent in a succession of post oil-recovery overseas investment-garnering initiatives that saw the presence of a retinue of senior Government of Guyana officials including Prime Minister Mark Phillips.
DDL’s new multi-million dollar investment disclosure comes at the end of what Samaroo told the US-based audience was “a five-year cycle in which the company committed some US$50 million in new capital investment into the company” almost four decades following the 1983 merger between Guyana Distilleries Limited and Diamond Liquors Limited to form the present company.
One of the major projects completed by the company under its earlier US$50 million capital investment initiative was the installation of a modern fruit processing plant to efficiently extract pulp from locally grown fruit for use in juice manufacturing, and a packaging plant for Fruit Juice and Dairy products. Samaroo announced that the plant is soon to be US Food and Drug Administration-certified, a development that will allow for the aggressive pursuit of export opportunities for the company’s fruit-based beverages.
As a public company with more than 8,600 shareholders, DDL enjoys the support and confidence of more than 1,100 shareholders in the diaspora, Samaroo said. “The best interest of its stakeholders is what drives the Directors and Management to continue to innovate and expand its horizon of the company,” he told the audience.
And according to Samaroo, spending over the next five years, will target “several new areas to support the existing businesses while expanding the range of its current activities and products.”
The DDL senior executive, meanwhile, shared with his New York audience the work of the company “as it continues to develop and expand the international footprint of its brands, and to create greater value proposition for its stakeholders.” Contextually, he disclosed that the company had been successful in realizing the “Origin of Its Product” status under the Geographical Indication (GI) regulations of the European Union. What this means is that “Demerara Rum can only be used as a descriptor for rum distilled in the Demerara region of Guyana,” an accomplishment which he said marks a first not just for Guyana but for the wider Caribbean as well.
According to Samaroo, even as DDL continues to be focussed on the enhancement of its entrepreneurial pursuits it remains mindful of its competence – enhancement and corporate social responsibilities. Accordingly, he disclosed that in seeking to ensure that it continues to add value to its own skills pool as well as to the national one, as a whole, DDL continues to provide scholarships to University scholarships for High School graduates employed with the company and who seek to advance their careers. At the same time, Samaroo said, the company continues to pursue the recruitment of university graduates for its management trainee programme” which he said has “provided most of the current executives of the company.”
Beyond these pursuits, Samaroo said, DDL “continues to support poor children who are successful at the National Grade Six Assessment for the leading high schools but who cannot afford to pursue these opportunities on account of poverty.” Twenty-five such children have already successfully graduated from High School “with excellent grades” while a further twenty- five are currently working towards graduation.
