FOSRICH is looking to boost its export business, targeting “two or three countries” in the next few months as the entity, which distributes and produces a range of lighting and electrical products, seeks to push its export earnings towards 5 per cent of total revenues in the next year.

Cecil Foster, managing director of FosRich, told the Jamaica Observer that even though the company has sent shipments of products to Barbados in the last few months, the impact on revenues is very minuscule. He, however, says the company’s management is looking at making a serious dent in coming years and will take it one step at a time, starting first with seeking greater opportunities in the only market it now exports.

“We are going to be in the space in Barbados for five days next week and we have a couple of deals that we are making with persons in Barbados,” Foster told the Caribbean Business Report on Thursday.

“We have also contracted a team of marketing and sales persons to go into Cayman and Turks and Caicos and some other islands in this month. So we are becoming more aggressive in looking at the export market. So before the end of this year, our goal is to have two or three more countries for our exports,” he continued before adding, “We’re looking at even Guyana in the next couple of months, so we are putting our team in together to get there”

Foster said the production capacity at its new plant in Hayes, Clarendon, is being boosted more than four times to accommodate sales growth both locally and in the export market.

The notice comes as the company reports stellar growth in the nine months to the end of September.

Over that period, FosRich reported that its revenues jumped 53 per cent to $2.6 billion while net profits grew at an even faster 116 per cent to $388 million. FosRich attributes the strong showing to increased sales in 11 of the 12 product groups it carries, with solar panels being the only group to register a decrease in sales when compared to the prior year.

“I think we can put this down to pretty good planning and equally good execution. We plan to be the leader in our field and we plan to use the method of staying close to our customers and understand them and work with them to find solutions. And so we are in that kind of a vein, and that has redound into us seeing revenues and profit the way it is,” Foster pointed out.

When asked if he is watching the news around a possible recession in the US from interest rate hikes aimed at curtailing decades high inflation and the impact it could have on Jamaica, Foster said he was still looking to segments such as LED, solar panels and the PVC business to continue to drive growth, especially as budget conscious consumers try to find savings from high electricity costs.

It was also pointed out that based on the latest data from the Statistical Institute of Jamaica, the country’s construction sector has recorded a decline of 5.2 per cent which should be a concern for his business which depends heavily on the segment for growth.

Foster replied: “I think what we have seen in our pipeline, meaning that projects that we are aligned to and are working with, those projects are [already] finance and they are in train, and we have a pretty good handle on a number of them, which I think will weather the storm for us for the next year or so, because they are already in train and they need their scheduled goods to come in at certain time, whether it be hotels, whether they be certain housing projects, whether it be for factories or something like that.”

He said the projects on hand should be enough to give the electrical business 30 per cent growth in the coming year.

“There’s no guarantee that things are going to work 100 per cent, but I see we are still very much on the positive side of the scale,” he concluded.