B.S.I Shows N.T.U.C.B the Records
B.S.I’s Director of Finance, Shawn Chavarria shared the records they shared with the N.T.U.C.B with the media this evening. He explained to us what they discussed, including the investments that the factory has made and the accompanying fees and expenditures and how those dynamics work.
Shawn Chavarria
Shawn Chavarria, Director of Finance, B.S.I.
“We demonstrated to them following the investment of $30 million to move the logistics operations to be quick, there will be significant savings for the industry. The first major one is with the ocean freight and how that materializes is because in Belize City, how we loaded vessels was offshore. So the vessels didn’t come into the port, it had to anchor six, seven miles outside of Belize City, and the thousand barges would load the sugar offshore. The amount of time that those vessels spent in the Belize City Harbor was significant. So a vessel, say, of 30, 000 [tons] would spend close to 60 days in the port of Belize City. Those of you who live in that area would know that you would see that vessel anchored outside of the harbor for a long period of time, and ships charge you a rate per day, so obviously the longer you spend in port, the higher the cost would be. But in Big Creek, because the port and the channel and the vessels anchor in, and then we have a warehouse – then we’re able to load these vessels quicker. So that same 30,000 [ton] vessel we can load it in five days. So that would have resulted in a significant ocean freight savings of about $60 Belize dollars per metric ton. Cargo dues, which are charged by the port authority, there will be no change to that. Here now are the other two points: Port admin and stevedoring, there was no throughput fee because we weren’t using the land at the port and there were no facilities there. It was all anchorage, but the port used to provide the stevedoring services, so we paid a stevedoring fee. That cost was around $32 Belize per ton versus Big Creek, which would be $275. The Port of Big Creek, though would charge a throughput fee, which is to lease land there and use the facilities for a period of 30 years. That class is $13.22, but when you combine the savings from the stevedoring with the cost of the throughput overall, we would be saving $16 per metric ton of sugar. So using the 2022 crop, when we ship 63, 214 metric tons of raw sugar, the savings that we realized was $76 per metric ton. The farmers’ share of that – 65 percent is $49, so their overall savings for that crop was $3.1 million. And this is what we explained back in 2021, when we were about to embark on the investment: that we would see these benefits, and we knew of the benefits because we did a trial before we made the investment. So all of this information was shared with the associations.”
