Long before his decision to move the services provided by Suriname Cartridge Depot to Guyana, Aristo Kelly had been doing diligent research into the likely level of market responsiveness in Guyana to the company’s product. The acceleration of several types of business necessitates including the generation of what are often tomes of documents: business plans, entrepreneurial proposals, outcomes of Commissions of Inquiry and reports of one sort or another and it has not taken the 12-year-old company long to realize that Guyana, like other growing economies, has an expanded demand for printed documents.
What Suriname Cartridge is offering is a service which he says can reduce printing costs by as much as 40 per cent. Rather than simply dispose of the cumbersome colour cartridges after the printing toner is finished, technicians employed by Suriname Cartridge Depot will simply replace the exhausted components with brand new ones.
The savings, Kelly says, are considerable. He gives an example of the A3 Colour Cartridge commonly used in copiers in Guyana. He estimates that a new one could cost between $70,000 and $80,000, while a cartridge completed outfitted with brand new components costs as little as $48,000.
Kelly is mindful to make the point that what his company is offering not a recycled product but a new one and one on which a guarantee is offered.
Born in the Netherlands to a Surinamese father and a St Lucian mother, the 36-year-old Kelly believes he is ideally credentialed to move his fledgling enterprise across what he believes is a potentially lucrative regional market. For the time being, however, Guyana is his focus. He is not unaware, he says, of the steady flow of Surinamese businesses into Guyana and his local office, a temporary one, he says, established at the corners of King and Charlotte streets, has already caught the attention of a few major local companies with which he has begun to do business.
It is the extent to which the service can create expanded demand here in Guyana that will determine its future. In the short term, the re-kitted cartridges will be imported into Guyana from Suriname. Kelly believes that once demand in Guyana reaches a level of around 300 cartridges per month then the time would have come to begin production operations here.
The plan, he says, is for the ISO-certified company to train local technicians in Suriname and the United States. At the local level he has already recruited a Sales Manager and an Office Administrator. The formal launch of the company here in Guyana will be done on November 17.
