PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

An­gos­tu­ra will con­tin­ue to ex­pand de­spite po­ten­tial geopo­lit­i­cal chal­lenges, chair­man Gary Hunt has said.

Hunt, who was in­ter­viewed af­ter the launch of An­gos­tu­ra’s new pack­ag­ing for its pre­mi­um rum range at Avala Restau­rant in Ch­agua­nas, said the com­pa­ny would con­tin­ue to pur­sue ag­gres­sive am­bi­tions de­spite the in­crease in tar­iffs im­posed on T&T ex­ports to the Unit­ed States.

He said, “At the last an­nu­al meet­ing, we made it very pub­lic that we want­ed to dou­ble our rev­enue and triple our prof­its. And that is no idle state­ment. It’s a goal we’ve set. In three years, we want to achieve that, and the team has now set about strate­gies to bring us to that point. And one of our big growth ar­eas is in the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket, and par­tic­u­lar­ly in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, which is the eas­i­est reach for us.

“When a chal­lenge is thrown at you, you have to rise to the chal­lenge. And al­ready we have made ad­just­ments in our pric­ing to share and ab­sorb some of the costs with our dis­trib­u­tors in the US. But we are mak­ing the ad­just­ments. We are not go­ing to sit by and cry and say, we can’t ask Mr Trump to change his pol­i­cy. We have to be ac­cep­tors of the pol­i­cy. But we will work with it. As I said, we are very, very cre­ative, in­no­v­a­tive peo­ple, and we will bring that to the fore.”

Hunt al­so said the com­pa­ny was not af­fect­ed by the for­eign ex­change sit­u­a­tion, as the com­pa­ny was a net gen­er­a­tor of for­eign ex­change.

“That may be an is­sue for the im­porters, we are man­u­fac­tur­ers. We make a prod­uct, we ship it out, we earn for­eign ex­change, we con­tribute in a very large way to the econ­o­my, and putting US dol­lars in­to our econ­o­my, mak­ing US dol­lars avail­able. So we are in a very unique sit­u­a­tion. That makes An­gos­tu­ra a gem in the na­tion­al fab­ric of the econ­o­my. We want to mag­ni­fy that, we want to grow that and make an even big­ger con­tri­bu­tion to our peo­ple,” said the An­gos­tu­ra chair­man.

Hunt, who was ap­point­ed An­gos­tu­ra chair­man last month, said the com­pa­ny would push on with plans for its glob­al ex­pan­sion.

“We have very ag­gres­sive am­bi­tions for the com­pa­ny. Eu­rope and all the oth­er coun­tries, we con­tin­ue and we will strength­en our mar­kets there. And in fact, we are in 170 coun­tries, but the am­bi­tion is to be in all 195. So, we are al­ready start­ing to work to put that in place, to give us that ex­tra 25 coun­tries that we need to get, so when we say glob­al, we ac­tu­al­ly mean it, that we are re­al­ly glob­al,” he said.

Dur­ing the event, deputy CEO of An­gos­tu­ra, Rahim Mo­hammed, made a call for more lo­cal sup­port of the brand.

“I don’t want to tell you what to buy, but buy lo­cal. Don’t take your mon­ey and sup­port in­ter­na­tion­al brands that re­al­ly don’t give back to the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty. We em­ploy, we train, we take our rev­enue and we put it in­to na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment and skills de­vel­op­ment. So there’s a big rip­ple ef­fect in sup­port­ing lo­cal and that is one of the main things I want to dri­ve here tonight,” said Mo­hammed.

Ac­cord­ing to its 2024 fi­nan­cial re­port, An­gos­tu­ra’s lo­cal rum sales dipped by five per cent.