Blairmont Sugar Estate to focus exclusively on export market

Blairmont Sugar Estate to focus exclusively on export market – GuySuCo CEO

Oct 08, 2020 News

By Malisa Playter-Harry

Kaieteur News – The ISO certified packaging plant at the Blairmont Sugar Factory will be tapping into the export market exclusively. This will be done as the estate moves in the direction of exporting more value-added products to the international markets. This was disclosed by the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo), Sasenarine Singh, during a tour of the packaging plant yesterday.

A section of the Blairmont Factory.

GuySuCo CEO, Sasenarine Singh, in conversation with the Blairmont Estate Manager.

Singh, who led a team of executives from GuySuCo and the estate, during a tour provided an opportunity to media operatives to see the operations of the packaging plant – from the grinding to the packaging stages.
Singh stated that currently Blairmont and the Enmore packaging plant are producing “excellent quality packaging products”. GuySuCO, he said, is on a “change plan” and what has been done over the past three weeks was the re-engineering of “the way we think in GuySuCo. The whole vision of GuySuCo right now is to move up the value chain as fast as we can.”
Presently, GuySuCo produces three main products (packaged sugar, bag sugar which is sold in 50kg bags and bulk sugar). The CEO said that the chunk of the revenue is earned from selling the packaged sugar while others are sold at a loss.
“The vision is to move GuySuCo away from bulk sugar to value added products, so we are building a

The packaging process.

short term, medium term and long-term plan,” he said.
He noted that presently what Blairmont is producing is being supplemented and as such Blairmont will now “be focusing exclusively on the export market for packaging sugar while Enmore will be focusing on the local market…”
Singh believes “greater” can be achieved by selling sugar at the right price and the right products. “Also by looking at the cost chain and ensuring that we can cut out, we identify what are the value added cost and segregate them and the ones that are not value added we are gonna make our enemy,” he said.
Moreover, Singh said, the focus will be placed on the factories, the fields, the cane transportation groups so that greater value can be brought to GuySuCo in the short term.
It was divulged that the government, on Monday, released $3B to GuySuCo with some capital investment projects to be executed across six estates. It was also noted that $2.2B will be put aside for the three estates that are to be reopened and $.8B will go towards recapitalising the current estates.
“GuySuCo gave over to NICIL, several years ago, several moving tractors, moving implements, moving elements for cane production and what we got back was several bits and pieces of iron. We are gonna rebuild the sugar industry brick by brick and prove to those people who want to destroy it that they can come back,” he said.
The CEO added that what they are hoping to do is to engage and have a public/private partnership to build the value-added elements around sugar.
“We are talking about refined sugar, ethanol and rum manufacturing…this is the level where we want to be at so that we can make it a viable element to continued contribution to the human development in Guyana. There are many people who said GuySuCo is a loss maker, economically GuySuCo has been one of the main contributors to the human development of the people of Guyana and because of that GuySuCo has to get some support from the people of Guyana in these times and reenergise,” Singh noted.
He mentioned that an official will be visiting the estates with the Agriculture Minister over the coming weekend and one of their expectations is to secure private participants at the value-added level in the sugar sector. This, he said, is to attract major investments in a refinery either at the Albion Estate or the Skeldon Estate. This, he added, will be done so that GuySuCo can tap into the Caribbean markets by using the Caribbean External Tariff Group and be competitive but still make a profit in that market space with the production of white sugar from the refinery. He said too, that GuySuCo is presently engaged in compiling a business turn-around plan and two consultants have been selected to work along in the office of the CEO. “I will be leading that effort to ensure that GuySuCo has a five-year-turn-around plan which will give us different options on what is the most efficient way to produce sugar going forward, do we need a COGEN plant, a refinery, an ethanol plant, combinations of these, what is it we do need to get? Right now, GuySuCo is hiring over 10,000 people and we will be bringing on an additional 3,000 people to the new estates. If we fail, we will be bringing great poverty…” he noted.
For the next 18 months, Singh assured that efforts will be made to push the packaged sugar product so that Guyana and Guyanese can benefit. It was revealed that already the first production out of Enmore has been sold.