3 months ago
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Manufacturing and distribution company Seprod Limited is looking to extract maximum benefit from its acquisition programme over the last two years.
Reporting to shareholders on Monday, CEO Richard Pandohie said since the company’s last annual meeting of shareholders, Caribbean Producers Jamaica, CPJ, officially joined the Seprod family, and Seprod increased its ownership stake in A.S. Bryden & Sons Holdings Limited to 80 per cent.
He described the moves as transformational in nature, as it expands its Caribbean footprint and cements itself as a leading manufacturing and fast-moving consumer goods company.
In 2024, Seprod’s revenue climbed to a new high of $133.6 billion, but net profit declined by 27 per cent to $3.32 billion, primarily due to higher finance costs, bigger operating expenses, and a substantially larger tax bill. Still, while the portion of profit attributable to owners of Seprod also fell, it was less stark, having declined from $2.9 billion to $2.6 billion.
Pandohie said the company’s spend on investments and acquisitions are already yielding results. Seprod invested over $7.7 billion into production capacity, logistics infrastructure, and strengthening its regional supply chain across years 2023 and 2024, he said.
Seprod is now looking to its workforce for continued consolidation and growth. Seprod and its member companies employ over 4,500 people across the region, up from just 1,500 a decade ago.
In a demographic breakdown of the workforce, Pandohie said the gender mix was now 56 per cent men and 44 per cent women, trending steadily towards parity; millennials account for 48 per cent, Gen Z, 27 per cent; Gen X, 22 per cent; and three per cent are baby boomers.
Pandohie says Seprod has intentionally cultivated a team that blends experience with agility and digital fluency. He says this will assist the company as it extracts more productivity from existing resources.
“With an average age of 36, and 75 per cent of our team under 40, Seprod has built a workforce that is energetic, future-focused, and built for sustainability. This didn’t happen by chance,” Pandohie reported to shareholders, adding that the company continues to invest in its workforce through plant certifications; science, technology, engineering and math, STEM, education and technical training, along with leadership development and succession planning at all levels.
Seprod Chairman Paul Scott said the expansion of Seprod, its infrastructural development and acquisitions have combined to give the company a distribution platform across the entire Caricom region, effectively recasting it as a ‘domestic’ marketplace for the Jamaican company and its businesses.
“If you think about that, that means what we produce in Jamaica, we can move duty-free to a shelf anywhere in the Caribbean,” Scott remarked.
“To the extent that Georgetown is more important than Spanish Town to us, I don’t think we’re there yet as a company, but I think we’re getting to a point where there are many, many Spanish Towns or many micro-markets across the Caribbean that we’re addressing,” he said.
He said with Seprod having coverage across the Caribbean now, shareholders should start to see growth in Guyana. The Suriname market is also being targeted. He also cited St Lucia, where CPJ has a strong presence, alongside St Vincent and Barbados, saying all those markets are growing and that this, in turn, is expected to spur organic growth within the Seprod Group.
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