The 2011 Trade and In­vest­ment Con­ven­tion (TIC) was the "best ever," gen­er­at­ing an es­ti­mat­ed US$50 mil­lion in sales, said TIC chair­man An­tho­ny Aboud. "The TIC was phe­nom­e­nal­ly suc­cess­ful. It was the best ever in terms of lo­cal and for­eign par­tic­i­pa­tion," he said. Aboud es­ti­mat­ed that 520 buy­ers from 38 coun­tries par­tic­i­pat­ed in the trade event, which was held at the Hy­att Re­gency Trinidad ho­tel, Port-of-Spain, in June. Thir­ty-six coun­tries ex­hib­it­ed. "In ex­cess of 500. We lost count af­ter that." Aboud at­trib­uted much of TIC's suc­cess to part­ner­ing with the Prime Min­is­ter's Of­fice and the Min­istry of Trade, as lead spon­sor, to cre­ate the Caribbean In­vest­ment Fo­rum for the first two days. The Min­istry of En­er­gy was a key at­trac­tion.

"It was a fo­rum for them to do busi­ness and they did. Com­pa­nies picked up new lines, new part­ners, new op­por­tu­ni­ties, new sup­pli­ers, new cus­tomers as a re­sult of TIC. My peo­ple (at Genethics Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals) picked up ex­port cus­tomers." Aboud is chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of Genethics Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals. "We have a very strong econ­o­my and I think that au­gurs well for peo­ple look­ing to place their mon­ey. Di­rect for­eign in­vest­ment: we have the kind of very sta­ble econ­o­my, when you look at what's go­ing on in the world-dou­ble dip re­ces­sion in the Unit­ed States, fail­ure in Eu­rope-T&T still stands very strong. We have a strong econ­o­my with a very favourable rat­ing." On June 5, the US rat­ings agency Moody's af­firmed T&T's Baa1 gov­ern­ment bond rat­ing, while main­tain­ing the sta­ble out­look of the coun­try's cred­it stand­ing.

"Every sin­gle one of the sem­i­nars-com­pressed nat­ur­al gas, al­ter­na­tive forms of en­er­gy-the Min­istry of En­er­gy put on was over­sold. They have de­cid­ed to do post-TIC sem­i­nars. The Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic room was packed, Cos­ta Ri­ca, Brazil," Aboud said. As a busi­ness­man eval­u­at­ing the T&T econ­o­my, Aboud said he's con­fi­dent of the man­age­ment of the T&T econ­o­my by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an. "I think the fis­cal dis­ci­pline ap­plied by the Fi­nance Min­is­ter has been very good. There are those who say he's tight, he doesn't want to spend but, quite frankly, he has to be cau­tious about how he spends."

Aboud said that peo­ple are talk­ing about projects, new in­vest­ments. "We have good fis­cal dis­ci­pline, a good out­look, not squan­der­ing. Now we need to fo­cus on an en­abling en­vi­ron­ment for in­vest­ments, to make things hap­pen quick­ly be­cause time is mon­ey."

Aboud on US cred­it

Aboud said Stan­dard and Poor's down­grade of US cred­it rat­ing from AAA to AA+ is the rat­ing of one agency. "This was the same agency that gave (the US) a rat­ing of AAA, and then you had the fi­nan­cial cri­sis. The oth­er two have not said any­thing," said Aboud, re­fer­ring to Moody's and Fitch's. Last Tues­day, Fitch's af­firmed its AAA cred­it rat­ing with a sta­ble out­look for the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, giv­ing the US a boost just two weeks af­ter S&P marked it down for the first time in his­to­ry. Cred­it rat­ing agency Moody's ear­li­er in Au­gust af­firmed its AAA rat­ing of US debt, but low­ered its out­look to neg­a­tive. He said Genethics Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals doesn't sell to the US, but is now look­ing to that mar­ket for Caribbean-based prod­ucts.

"We just launched Salve in June. We've been mak­ing Salve for 14 years. The John­son & John­son equiv­a­lent is Savlon. They re­cent­ly de­cid­ed they are no longer go­ing to make Savlon in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean. "Our next step af­ter sell­ing in the is­lands is sell­ing it to West In­di­ans in the US, Eng­lish peo­ple who live in the US. "We have ven­dors in the US, Eu­rope and Asia. I buy a lot of raw ma­te­ri­als from US, like ac­eta­minophen from a com­pa­ny in the US, codeine phos­phate, a lot of our chem­i­cal-based prod­ucts come from the US. The cost of our raw ma­te­ri­als has gone up. An­hy­drous glu­cose (sug­ar) we save 40 per cent on that prod­uct by buy­ing it from Eu­rope. We switched six months ago." He said the ma­jor­i­ty of Cari­com coun­tries are tourism-de­pen­dent, and a weak­en­ing of dis­pos­able in­come in the US will im­pact on the re­gion's tourism rev­enue.

"Cu­ba, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic and Mex­i­co are fight­ing for tourism, run­ning for tourist dol­lar. That means less dis­pos­able in­come in the hands of the Caribbean con­sumer. "Eighty per cent of our mar­ket is the Caribbean. Those re­gion­al mar­kets will be­come more ag­gres­sive in terms of food they buy and how much they pay."

TIC fact box:

• the Man­u­fac­tur­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) hosts TIC, the prof­its from which fund the TTMA's sec­re­tari­at

• TIC host­ed 175 booths

• 23 per cent were oc­cu­pied by first-time par­tic­i­pants

• in­ter­na­tion­al par­tic­i­pa­tion in­creased with 44 per cent of ex­hibitors hail­ing from over­seas

• more than 80 per cent of ex­hibitors in­tend to re­turn for TIC 2012