I refer to the article in yesterday's Guardian page 18 by Raphael John-Lall. The article misrepresented my comments. I did not say that we should place embassies where we sell products. If we did then it would make good sense to place one in China, where we are selling and hope to sell a lot of energy products (LNG, petrochemicals).I was not talking about exporting products. We sell very few products to Africa so my comments, as misreported, on having diplomatic missions there do not make sense.
I was talking about the potential for exporting energy services which was the entire point of the discussion. I made the point that to sell services you needed to have someone on the ground constantly looking at business opportunities.
I contrasted T&T overseas missions with the missions of countries which we were competing against in terms of selling energy services, such as the US, UK and Norway, and pointed out that those countries had strong presence on the ground in the markets that we have identified as good potential targets, such as Ghana and Tanzania.
If we really want to compete in those markets in selling energy services we also need strong presence on the ground. I did specifically say I thought it was more important to set up a presence in Ghana than in China.
We do have missions in three African countries, namely Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa. This is a great start but we need to have a much stronger permanent trade delegation presence in those markets and in Ghana, Tanzania and Kenya. We could possibly also add Angola to that list as a good potential market for energy services.The misrepresentation of my comments needlessly created a sense of controversy, but missed the essential point that I was making.
Dax Driver,
CEO, Energy Chamber