Company Profile - Pritipaul Singh Investment Limited
The way Pritipaul Singh Investments Limited is run is the way you’d probably expect a decades-old business to run, people with eons of experience in the fishing industry. A visit to company’s McDoom headquarters is a lesson in efficiency, even if a casually executed efficiency at that.

The company however, at just eight years old, is relatively as new as Guyana is to industrial level commercial fishing. PSI’s tersely worded mission statement however sums up what appears to be the internal corporate ‘zeitgeist’ that has defined this entity since its establishment eight years ago.
“We are,” the statement says, “in the business to harvest and process shrimp and fish. Our goal is to be the best in this business. In order to accomplish this goal, all personnel must believe in this goal. Our ability to be able to achieve this mission is the responsibility of all personnel. Pritipaul Singh Investment Inc will provide everyone with the necessary tools to do this. PSI Inc. will do its part and expects everyone involved to do his or her part. By doing this we will continue to grow and prosper.”

The men behind PSI are Pritipaul Singh, the company’s Founder and Managing Director, and Ronald Deen, the Finance Director. Singh, unavailable at the time of the Review’s visit possesses an iconic status within PSI – and one suspects outside of – as a visionary and risk taker. A former trader and primary school teacher, Mr. Singh’s gamble on the fishing industry in Guyana – financed through contacts provided by the older Deen – has paid off and though it still owes money to the banks, PSI is servicing its debts without slippage.

Mr. Deen is obviously the more pragmatic element within the company’s dynamic. On the job, he is grizzly, tough talking and shrewd, able to make productive workers out of the many hardened young men from depressed areas that have found employment at the company – in total, the company employs some 1,500 workers directly with about 500 artisanal fishermen dependent on the company to buy their catch. The semi-militaristic air of efficiency which pervades the PSI headquarters seems to virtually emanate from the Finance Director.

“Time is our working capital,” Deen told us. On a tour of PSI’s processing plant, this principle is evident everywhere, from the design of the facility, geared as much to smoothly transfer workers from one section to the next as it is to manage seafood from the company’s fleet of finfish, seabob and prawns trawlers. It takes about fifteen minutes, for example, for shrimp to move from loading baskets to the packaging and sealing machine, cleaned, graded, weighed and ready to be frozen before the long journey to the company’s markets in the Caribbean and North America. It is not long before PSI product – sold under its Mid-Atlantic Seafoods brand – finds its way into European kitchens, with the company now under the rigorous process that comes with EU certification. Once that comes through, all things considered, the sky seems to be limit for PSI.