The happy brewer
SP Brewery boss upbeat about future
Running a manufacturing business in Papua New Guinea is like being a farmer, according to managing director of SP Brewery, Stan Joyce. “We had this amazing boom during the LNG construction phase and the commodity boom,” he says. “Now things have slowed down but the business is still stronger than it was before.”
Joyce says the lack of availability of foreign exchange is a concern. He says people remember previous crises and are trying to avoid a repeat.
Joyce says moving more to local suppliers is one way of responding to the currency difficulties. “You can shift to locals to some degree and there is no doubt we are doing that; you can do those things to mitigate it.
Joyce believes it is a myth that beer is a recession-proof industry, although there is always demand.
“People always enjoy a beer; they enjoy it a lot more when they have got money. If you are drinking because you are sorrowful it is terrible.”
Papua New Guinea, says Joyce, has become “more globally connected”, but many difficulties remain.
“There are always logistical challenges,” he says. Some of the problems identified by Joyce include access to consistent, clean power, the state of the Highlands Highway, and the unreliability and cost of the internet.
Joyce says, operationally, the business is in good shape. ‘ We have got all the things
In a manufacturing sense, you look at the country (PNG) and it has a young, urbanising population – it has got the things that the rest of the world wants.
under control; we are pretty well oiled after 65 years.
“Business in PNG is a bit like farming. If there is a drought there is nothing you can do. There are a couple of good years, and a couple of bad years, and the rest of it is somewhere between the two. It is cyclical, and now we are somewhere back where we were in the mid-1990s.
“We will just take a big deep breath, we will ensure our business stays fit and do the things we need to do.
“PNG has six million people, and five million of them live in villages. They are semi-subsistence; they are in and out of the economy. So life never changed very much for them during the boom and it won’t change too much during the downturn.”