The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

Key shipping costs into Freeport have fallen by around 30 per cent, a leading businessman saying he wanted to reduce them further to where investors were “tripping over themselves” to do business in the city

Robert Myers, the Nassau-based businessman behind the VTrade light manufacturing/distribution enterprise, told Tribune Business that a major private-public sector collaboration had bought into his plan to reduce Less Than Container Load (LCL) shipping costs into Freeport.

Hutchison Whampoa, the Freeport Container Port’s (FCP) majority shareholder and operator, was now “on board” with an initiative that, Mr Myers said, was also being backed by the Government and Grand Bahama Port Authority (GBPA).

Emphasising that this was part of a wider initiative to “remove impediments” to doing business in Freeport, the VTrade chief said the failure to offer LCL shipping into the Container Port in the past had cut-off 70 per cent of the city’s potential business market.

While major Freeport-based industrial players such as Pharmachem and Polymers International typically brought in full shipping containers, a service well-catered to at the FCP, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often required containers less than 100 per cent full.

This market segment was being ignored in Grand Bahama, and Mr Myers told Tribune Business:”The cost of getting goods in and out is critical to small and medium-sized enterprises

“There’s a massive amount of business to be had in the SMEs sector. They account for 70 per cent of business in the US. If you are trying to attract manufacturers to that location [Freeport], it can only work if you find an efficient means of getting product in and out.

“There’s a massive amount of the market that’s not been captured in Freeport. We’ve got to fix LCL, make it more attractive for foreign investors and locals to come in. We are making some headway.”

Mr Myers said a dedicated group involving the Government, GBPA and Hutchison/FCP was “working towards getting that dealt with”.

“We’ve already reduced the cost of LCL shipping by probably 30 per cent, not to where it needs to be, and we’d like to get it down considerably more,” he added.

Mr Myers said the ultimate goal was to reduce shipping costs between Miami and Freeport to the same rate as the routes between Orlando/Jacksonville and Miami.

“That’s what we’re after,” he told Tribune Business. “We’ve got to get to that point to be globally competitive. What we’re trying to do is global commerce, not local commerce.”

This meant that getting the Miami-Freeport shipping rate to match that between Freeport-Nassau was not good enough. Mr Myers pointed out that Freeport was not only competing with Panama/Colon, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, but was also faced with competition from Miami for post-Panamax vessel business in the wake of the Panama Canal expansion.

“We’ve got to make it so easy to do business in Freeport that you trip over yourself to get in the door,” Mr Myers told Tribune Business. “Everyone else is doing the same. If we don’t do that, the world’s a smaller place, and big companies looking for those advantages will go elsewhere.

“I’m still very bullish if we can all work together.” Mr Myers identified Immigration, Customs, inspection lines and freight pre-clearance as areas where there were potential challenges to doing business in Freeport.

“These are still real challenges when you look at the global market,” he added.