Industry must co-operate on common problems, writes Ray Smuts
EVEN experts can err.
That was the underlying message from John Stanbury, Capespan's outgoing managing director, as he reflected on his and the organisation's performance over the past year and on prospects ahead.
Stanbury told FTW while he expected Capespan to increase total volumes by between 15% and 20% next year, exporting around 70 million cartons of all fruit, he believed citrus market share would drop because of a certain degree of unhappiness within the industry.
Last year was a very good year due to citrus being in short supply but this year the worst since deregulation because of over-supply and when that happened we were way off on price predictions.
The market caught us totally unaware and our price predictions were way higher than what was actually returned. Because of this, there is a lot of unhappiness with producers saying 'I did not do well so I am going to leave Capespan.'
Citrus aside, however, there was a definite producer swing back to Capespan, mainly in the deciduous areas of grapes, stone and pome fruit.
These producers have been in the market, tried other avenues and found they were not doing better than being part of Capespan which is able to offer products into many more markets.
Stanbury emphasised the need for the worthwhile industry players to co-operate with regard to certain common problems.
As producers become more astute as to how they choose exporters, looking at track records for instance, they will be taken to the cleaners less often than has been the case thus far, so I would in the year ahead expect to see greater co-operation with producer units and also with exporters which will hopefully bring a fairly large degree of common sense back into the industry.
Asked to evaluate his performance at Capespan's helm, Stanbury conceded this was a difficult question to answer.
Bottom line profit for 2000 is a bad performance essentially in two areas; packaging company losses which company we have now closed and shipping company losses which company we have restructured. Even though these are non-recurring losses I cannot think my performance has been good.
Regarding the merger, getting the groups together, putting international globalisation on track and restructuring this business I would say my performance has been above average.
Copyright Now Media (Pty) Ltd
No article may be reproduced without the written permission of the editor
To respond to this article send your email to joyo@nowmedia.co.za
