Three months ago one of the pioneers of urban commercial activity in contemporary Georgetown finally cut its trading ties with the city, closing down its well-known distribution outlet at the corner of Camp and Robb streets and shifting those operations to the industrial site on the southern edge of the city where its factory operations had been located for several years.

Managing Director of the Kissoon Group of Companies Hemraj Kissoon believes that the consolidation of the company’s manufacturing and distribution facilities inside the single,sprawling space that the industrial site affords, is a strategically significant move for the company.

Kissoon’s Furniture Complex at the Industrial Site. Inset is Managing Director Hemraj Kissoon

Kissoon is convinced that central Georgetown’s role as the nerve centre of trading is changing. Many of the modest retail outlets that first emerged in the city in the 1950s are giving way to multi-storeyed complexes that provide commercial space for multiple entities under a single roof. When you ask Kissoon about this transformation he would only offer you a reflective smile after which he would simply say, “things are different now.”

Just how different things are is reflected in the crowded streets, and disappearance of parking space and mountains of garbage and a general sense of congestion that is counterproductive for trading. For the 70-year-old entrepreneur it is not just a question of finally getting away from the rush and crush of Georgetown; it is also about strategically repositioning the company’s furniture operations to facilitate the market.

From Kissoon’s vantage point, the shift to the industrial site renders the shopping facility accessible to more of the country. He believes the strategic advantage of being positioned at the industrial site has to do with enabling customers to circumvent an increasingly unappealing capital. What he has worked out is that people shopping for furniture really don’t need to visit the store every day and when they finally do so they need time and space to carefully contemplate their choices.

The spacious Kissoon Furniture Complex is about the equivalent of a giant banqueting hall and immediately upon entering you get a better sense of what the company has to offer. It occurs to you too that here is a traditional manufacturer of local furniture that continues to compete successfully with the surfeit of importers that have sprung up over time, the range of items reflecting the fact the Kissoon Furniture Complex has somehow managed to retain a generous share of the creative skills which
Kissoon says are fast disappearing.

The flight of skills, he says, is, in large measure, a function of the absence of any real incentive to remain wedded to those skills. There is a dearth of training facilities and across the industry the pay is not as attractive as it ought to be. Kissoon is advocating the accumulation of resources for training through a special tax that accumulates the resources for what he says is an important investment in the future of the country’s economy.

Still more, he believes, has to be done to level the playing field in the manufacturing sector, which is burdened by operating costs that renders it well nigh impossible for locally manufactured goods to compete with imported ones. His own company is spared some – though not all – of the handicaps associated with external competition only because of its integrated nature. Its investments in forests and in a foam factory have meant that it controls much of the vital raw material supplies with which to manufacture its primary products. He believes that there is fundamental deformity in a manufacturing sector which is being strangled by unfair external competition though he stresses that he is not an enemy of free trade.

Hemraj Kissoon returns to the issue of the capital suddenly. It is an issue with which he is comfortable. He has witnessed the urban transformation over several decades and believes that Georgetown is hard-pressed to pull the weight that is required to carry any longer. The need to create more living spaces in and near the capital has meant that increasing areas of arable land that would better serve the country’s agricultural sector are being surrendered to housing. His proposal is that the issue of resiting the capital be addressed with a far greater sense of urgency. He suggests that the new capital be located somewhere in the region of the Bartica triangle.

From Hemraj Kissoon’s standpoint the old trading location at Camp and Robb streets has passed into the company’s history. It is, he says, easier to manage the group of companies from a single location. It comprises five sets of operations that include a cattle ranch at Abary and a company called Guyana Builders and Materials Inc and the Group’s Managing Director makes no secret of the fact that the operations clustered under one of Guyana’s best-known trading names are now well within his own comfort zone.

He doesn’t dwell on those challenges that are internal to his own business operations. It is not so much that there are no major challenges as it is that decades of experience has tutored him in how to deal with those problems.

While he does not overlook his own overarching role as Managing Director he believes that in large measure a regime has long been created that has set the Kissoon Group of Companies on auto pilot. Some things might have changed but change, Kissoon says, has been undertaken with a view to making the company more appealing to the market.

Still, from Kissoon’s standpoint, the more things change, the more they stay the same. He insists that the company’s furniture complex still strives to retain its tried and proven traditional relationships with the market. He talks about hire purchase deals and lay away arrangements and essays comparisons with some of the more recent entrants into the furniture trade. Then he falls silent; a silence which says chalk and cheese.

Georgetown’s transformation, he says, will continue. There is an inevitability to what he regards as an evolution that compels us to see both the country’s capital and its commercial culture differently.