EDITOR, The Tribune.
In the May 12th edition of The Nassau Guardian’s National Review, Mr Tony Myers of Sandy Cay Development Ltd presented his case against the “hysteria” surrounding the cost of Aragonite.
In his interview with Candia Dames, he indicated that his company has not made a profit since beginning operations. This begs the question as to why a successful businessman remains in business for at least five years, without making a profit.
During his interview with Candia Dames, Mr Myers gave an example or reasons why the cost of Aragonite would increase to $75.00 per metric ton for glass making and up to $400.00 per metric ton for the plastic market. He also gave his reasons for not entering the high profit, retail end of the aragonite market.
The example includes labour, specialty equipment and high utility cost. Based on this information, we decided to search into the plastic industry and the company US Aragonite. We wanted to know the viability of entering the processing market and the possibility of excluding Value Added Tax from the discussion with this new potential revenue source. What we found was a market that is open to extreme amounts of profit and wondered why would a successful businessman refuse this option, considering he is the current president of Purity Bahamas Ltd, Sandy Cay Development Ltd, and Bahamas Hotmix (BHM Ltd).
The question remains, what is the real connection between US Aragonite and Sandy Cay Development Ltd. Currently what we found out about USAragonite:
• It was formed in 2011.
• It has trademarked Bahamian Aragonite Powder as Oshenite.
• It has a partnership with Sandy Cay Development.
• We know that the address for US Aragonite is located in a residential area of Salem, Massachusetts, which is not zoned for an industrial business.
• Tony Myers of Sandy Cay Development and Mark Goldenberg presented at a Plastic Industry Conference last year May.
What is interesting about that information, other than during that presentation at the Plastic Industry conference, it was mentioned that the owners of Ocean Cay are investors of US Aragonite.
Here are a few other questions:
• How would making the supplier of your raw material benefit your company?
• What does Sandy Cay Development stand to gain by becoming an investor of the retail end of the aragonite industry?
• Is he purposefully devaluing the cost of aragonite in an effort to benefit/increase his investment?
• Is Sandy Cay Development intentionally not making a profit?
STRAIGHT UP TALK
straightuptalk242@groups.facebook.com
Note: Straight Up Talk is a non-partisan group on Facebook that says it aspires to prod the minds of the average Bahamian.
Comments
realfreethinker 9 years, 11 months ago
Buy low from ocean cay and sell high through Us Aragonite . making money on both ends that is how the game is played.
242orgetslu 9 years, 11 months ago
PLEASE READ AND PASS ON! This is the link where the full story is: http://si.com/vault/article/magazine/...">http://si.com/vault/article/magazine/...
Across the inky-blue Gulf Stream from Florida, near the sheer edge of the Great Bahama Bank, a new island is emerging from the sea. Although it bears the appealing name Ocean Cay, this new island is not, and never will be, a palm-fringed paradise of the sort the Bahamian government promotes in travel ads. No brace of love doves would ever choose Ocean Cay for a honeymoon; no beauty in a brief bikini would waste her sweetness on such desert air. Of all the 3,000 islands and islets and cays in the Bahamas, Ocean Cay is the least lovely. It is a flat, roughly rectangular island which, when completed, will be 200 acres and will resemble a barren swatch of the Sahara. Ocean Cay does not need allure. It is being dredged up from the seabed by the Dillingham Corporation of Hawaii for an explicit purpose that will surely repel more tourists than it will attract. In simplest terms, Ocean Cay is a big sandpile on which the Dillingham Corporation will pile more sand that it will subsequently sell on the U.S. mainland. The sand that Dillingham is dredging is a specific form of calcium carbonate called aragonite, which is used primarily in the manufacture of cement and as a soil neutralizer. For the past 5,000 years or so, with the flood of the tide, waters from the deep have moved over the Bahamian shallows, usually warming them in the process so that some of the calcium carbonate in solution precipitated out. As a consequence, today along edges of the Great Bahama Bank there are broad drifts, long bars and curving barchans of pure aragonite. Limestone, the prime source of calcium carbonate, must be quarried, crushed and recrushed, and in some instances refined before it can be utilized. By contrast, the aragonite of the Bahamian shallows is loose and shifty stuff, easily sucked up by a hydraulic dredge from a depth of one or two fathoms. The largest granules in the Bahamian drifts are little more than a millimeter in diameter. Because of its fineness and purity, the Bahamian aragonite can be used, agriculturally or industrially, without much fuss and bother. It is a unique endowment. There are similar aragonite drifts scattered here and there in the warm shallows of the world, but nowhere as abundantly as in the Bahamas. In exchange for royalties, the Dillingham Corporation has exclusive rights in four Bahamian areas totaling 8,235 square miles. In these areas there are about four billion cubic yards—roughly 7.5 billion long tons—of aragonite. At rock-bottom price the whole deposit is worth more than $15 billion. An experienced dredging company like Dillingham should be able to suck up 10 million tons a year, which will net the Bahamian government an annual royalty of about $600,000.
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