Regional powerhouse ANSA McAL turned 140 years old this year. And the group’s chief executive officer Anthony N Sabga III says the intention is for the conglomerate to be around for at least another 140 years more.
“Underpinning everything we are and we do here, we continue to recognise and remember this is a 140-year-old conglomerate and we aim to be around and sustaining generations for well beyond another 140 years,” Sabga stated.
“And as such sustainability remains a very critical and key long term value enhancing agenda item for us and one whereby we test all that we do against these parameters,” he stated.
Sabga made the statement during a stockholders’ meeting this week where the conglomerate’s financial results for the first half of this year were revealed.
The genesis of what is now ANSA McAL started in 1881 when George R Alston founded Geo R Alston & Co which traded in the buying and exporting of local produce particularly cocoa.
Apart from expanding its reach globally, ANSA McAL intends on playing its part to save the planet, Sabga said.
“Sustainability is not just a catchword for us. The environmental and sustainable strategy of our group and being a responsible and sustainable partner and partaker in the regional economy is something that we hold very important and dear to us and something that qualifies all of the key decision making that we do,” Sabga said.
“We remain the region’s largest glass and plastic recycler. We are transitioning to CNG distribution for our fleets and we continue to remain quite aggressive on the renewable energy front and are making deeper investments into the Latin American renewable energy space.
“We certainly see opportunities and we will continue to seek opportunities to exploit the capability, capacity and the key learnings we have had in those investments outside of the region with potential investments within the region to come” he said.
He said the sustainability goal was one of four strategic pillars identified by the conglomerate for its post-pandemic agenda.
“Primarily we seek to deliver quality and sustainable economic value creation and we will do this in order to facilitate growth. A key pillar is increased access to foreign exchange, reduction of business risk whether from the existing portfolio or through new portfolio businesses, acquisitions in other sectors and geographies,” Sabga stated.
“So this is where we very excitingly rebalance and reimagine on an ongoing basis the portfolio and do so via economic value creating long term shareholder value-enhancing lens,” he said.
Another pillar, Sabga said, is to continue to deliver exceptional ease of doing business and customer experiences.
“We aim to be second to none in this area. We actually championed this at a corporate level but additionally, each of our particular business units are doing what they need to do in order to create compelling and sustainable customer value propositions, continuously grow revenue and enhance the group’s corporate brand. This is of utmost importance to us,” he said.
Sabga said another post-pandemic pillar for the conglomerate is continuously seeking to enhance its operational efficiency.
“We continuously seek to enhance our operational efficiency in order to drive margins reducing operating costs and doing so in an enabling manner where we can continue to deliver an exceptional market creating and marketing enhancing quality of service,” he said.
Sabga said ANSA McAL maintains a positive outlook for the future. He said the conglomerate’s beverage sector continues to innovate in an exceptional and accelerated manner while deriving significant growth from the innovation pipeline and various renovations of the flagship brands.
“We continue to invest heavily to ensure that we keep our plants where they need to be and also seeking efficiency and effectiveness from a sustainability standpoint across all of our various plants and markets,” Sabga said.
He added that the recovery of the recently-rebranded Carib Beer facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida, was “very encouraging”.
“It is good to start to finally see that asset performing in the manner in which we expect it to. It has faced some incredible headwinds since purchase notwithstanding the shuttering of an entire industry but it is certainly where we want it to be and that is very encouraging,” Sabga said.
“And I am also happy to announce that we are very close towards announcing the groundbreaking launch of our fifth brewery which is carded for 2022 in Antigua,” he said.
Sabga said the ANSA McAL’s automotive sector is “certainly facing some challenging times.”
“But we are seeing a great opportunity with the newly entered and invested ANSA automotive in Guyana where we represent the Suzuki line of business as well as a pipeline of additional brands we are looking at,” he said.
“We continue to see growth there alongside a robust oil and gas economy and gold economy,” he said.
Sabga said a key focus of ANSA McAL’s financial sector is the onboarding and transformation of ANSA Bank.
“The name change has been completely finalised. The transformation plan is going exceptionally well and the digital customer interfacing innovation is proceeding quite nicely and the investments in that area would bear significant fruit as we tighten and seek to launch those innovative offerings into the market,” he said.
The outlook on ANSA McAL’s manufacturing sector is also “very promising,” he said.
“I mentioned previously that we have put transfilling harbours for our chemicals or water treatment business into Jamaica and that has started to materialise in very profound and meaningful ways and we were able to bring that unique capability of water treatment and support to the Jamaican market,” he said.
“We have also relaunched what is the ANSA packaging group which allows us to go to market as one unified packaging organisation where we are a significant, as you guys are aware, glass packaging and also plastic packaging.
“This allows us to bring the synergies of those two businesses together meaningfully to support the unified customer base that exists out there for this category of services and that is proceeding quite well and quite interestingly,” Sabga said.
ANSA McAL’s construction sector, Sabga said, is seeing a level of expansion and innovation in the colour offerings and colour shops of the paint business from as far north as Jamaica to as far south as Guyana.
He said the integration and incorporation of Berger into the portfolio has helped in this regard.
