Twenty Percent of Consumer Traffic at CFZ after Reopening
After almost a year of inactivity, the Corozal Free Zone was reopened to business on February first. That’s because a raft of new measures was put in place to ensure that the potential spread of COVID-19 was kept at an extreme minimum. Even with all things in place, however, the customs-free shopping area is still not realizing the profits it once enjoyed before the pandemic struck. In fact, the Corozal Free Zone is not firing on all pistons, with only twenty percent of shoppers crossing over from Mexico on a weekly basis. News Five’s Isani Cayetano visited the northern border today and has a follow up to our initial story on its reopening.
Isani Cayetano, Reporting
Since resuming commercial activity at the beginning of the month, traffic at the Corozal Free Zone is still only a trickle. Things are slowly returning to normal at the duty-free shopping space, but local investors are now faced with another challenge. Just across the Subteniente Lopez Bridge at the northern border, another retail district has also been opened to Mexican consumers.
Anil Hotchandani
Anil Hotchandani, Vice Chairman, Corozal Free Zone
“I look at it positively, I think that free zone is going to be importing everything from our Port of Belize, all the imports from a logistical point of view. One of the ideas, [and] we can work hand in hand, we can have a trade agreement between the two. I think our customer base for the entire Corozal Free Zone is Mexico. In Chetumal Free Zone, we can sell through them in Mercado Libre. Mercado Libre is their version of Amazon. So they can showcase, you know, our products on the web and they have the logistics to ship out and collect which is impossible for us to do from Corozal Free Zone.”
It’s a progressive way of viewing competition, by forging a partnership that is mutually beneficial for stakeholders on either side of the Rio Hondo. In Belize, however, business is only a fifth of what it once was before the pandemic brought the economy to its knees.
Anil Hotchandani
“The traffic and the movement of people are staggering, I think because the pandemic is still quite rampant in Mexico they are slow but sure. We are experiencing from the highest point when we were at a hundred percent of shoppers, we are at twenty percent now. So we’re getting in probably three to four hundred cars a day, you can say about three to four thousand cars a week, with three passengers per car. [That’s] about eleven thousand people that are visiting the zone, mostly Mexicans.”
That figure represents a fraction of the business that ordinarily takes place on a weekly basis at the Corozal Free Zone. For Vice Chairman Anil Hotchandani, today is still better than where they were a year ago when everything ground to a screeching halt.
Anil Hotchandani
“Something is better than nothing. You know when you have had a situation when you were at zero. Businesses totally closed down and there was zero income, people had to find ways and means to survive. So that has been the situation. When the pandemic hit, remember I’ve always said this, the government steps in to help employees, food packages, social security comes in with financial assistance. Social partners come in and try to help out. But for one minute, who helps the business community?”
Notwithstanding what Hotchandani describes as abandonment in a time of need, there is optimism that the Corozal Free Zone will rebound fully, even if it takes a year to get back on its feet.
Anil Hotchandani
“There’s positivity in the air. The Briceño administration has opened the zone successfully, safely and this has had a substantial benefit for the employees who have gotten jobs in the zone to start.”
Isani Cayetano
“Now I understand that it’s like one-third of the employee population that’s back at the free zone?”
Anil Hotchandani
“Yes, you have a little over a thousand [employees]. It’s like one thousand, thirty-five [workers] but if you translate that to money, it’s ten million dollars annually and if the whole free zone was to come back to a hundred percent of employment, we would be at forty million in salaries and remunerations and you will add another ten or fifteen million on social fees that the free zone, that the government earns by way of social fees. We would have fifty to sixty million Belize dollars annually to the G.D.P. from the northern free zone.”
For now, that contribution to Belize’s gross domestic product by way of peak economic activity at the free zone remains a distant target. Reporting for News Five, I am Isani Cayetano.
