Let's begin with the group, outline briefly how SUMA was established and why?
Let me give you a brief summary of our company. SUMA was founded approximately 16 years ago and our main concern is the integration of technology and business. That is, technology has to be used intelligently so business can have greater and more focused strategies that make better use of technology. As a matter of fact reengineering, for example, should be based on the intelligent use of our technologies because that is going to present and offer new opportunities. For the past 16 years we have been in operation, we have worked in strategic planning for quality companies. We have done that for probably 18 or 19 companies. We have done that in groups for approximately 300 companies and we have also worked in technology itself. We have the first US partners in Central America and two of those are in artificial intelligence and those partners are supposedly very interesting because we have really gotten offers. We are now mostly focused on the creation of new companies. We have been working as an incubator because that makes all the sense now that is since we have been working in strategic planning and the integration of technology. Now that we have this huge wave of internet concerns it makes all the sense that we work on the creation of new companies.
Can you explain a little bit how you create companies?
We have several seminars that we offer to the public and these cover topics of how commerce creates new opportunities for businesses, which is for new inexistent businesses. They are focused for high level management, executives and entrepreneurs and we have had more than 2,000 participants in this past year. For next year we are planning a large international convention bringing in participants from the US, Mexico and Central America and it is going to be exactly the same topic. Then we get together with a lot of people and we present them the opportunities and technologies and at that point we can begin developing a relationship with those people. As a second stage we have an internet globe, we call it Globe E-Commerce, and it has two ways of operation. One of them is the main website because it has the chat, news group signer, library consultations and that kind of stuff and then we have the live meetings. We have a large number of business ideas. For example, exactly one a year ago a person from the US Embassy in Guatemala came to our office and said that he attended one of our seminars and that he had an order form the White House, that is from the office of the Vice-President, to select one person from Guatemala to represent the country in a meeting in Washington. This meant that Guatemala is going to be one of the countries that has been selected as the most prominent for using e-commerce for economical development. I went there and with the whole set of presentations I focused exactly how for the first time in history e-commerce can be used to develop a country and that this is the best way to help these countries. Guatemala was one of the countries for all the reasons you mentioned precisely that is best for that. And so we understand that we are doing work directly in the strategy that Washington is considering as one of the best opportunities for the country's development. Now, Rodolfo Paiz, the father, has had for almost 20 years a lot of initiatives focused precisely in that direction in developing the country. The latest one is called "The Civil Society Project". It makes a lot of sense that we have heard from Bill Gates that the digital system of governments can now be the internet. That is we can get a hand to respond quickly and in a better way so the government is going to be all connected. The problem, Rodolfo says, is that all the people of the country do not have a way to be represented, that is we have business and government represented but the public itself has no representation, so it makes a lot of sense to help them get informally organized through the network. So it is an internet network with a lot of help. Also of educational institutions and international groups (it is very similar in Costa Rica). The project is that we are going to the countryside, installing small offices, some of them portable with computers. We have a center here in this office where we follow all the transactions as e-mails. This is just getting started but we have already the first working in Coban and Jutiapa and that plan is within a 3 years period because we are going be in all the communities. This is one example of the projects we are doing for the development of the country. So we are like a different company because we have had not followed the standards of typical Guatemalan and South American companies, which is strong control and very well defined functions for each employee.
Does the government come in to these projects, do you work with them?
Very little and at the very beginning we worked with the government very closer, as a matter of fact half of my company went over to the government and I almost have to close. When you work with government in Guatemala you have to be very careful because usually there are two ways: one of them is that you plan to make a lot of money and the other is that you have to find the unusual way to do business and we do not like that. Every single time we have worked with the government we have lost a lot of money. So for a survival thing we had to limit our work with the government to a minimum.
Should this be the place where people come to invest and treat it as a Central American gateway?
Anyone that is Guatemalan will always say Guatemala
goes first and of course I'd love to say that. The
only thing I will say is that Costa Rica is getting
saturated now with investors and in Guatemala we
are just getting started so probably investment
opportunities in Guatemala might be more interesting
right now. The advantages we have here are: one
has to consider that ever since the Quetzal was
first invented the exchange rate goes to 1 to 7.75
to 1. If you compare this with other countries in
America we have one of the best records. Second
consideration, taking all things aside is that you
are told about the political economic situation
in Guatemala; the fact is that any forecast of the
next year of economical development in Guatemala
usually starts with 4% growth. We have a tremendous
stable environment when it comes to real facts.
The third concept to take into account is the government
intervention. Even though the government in Guatemala
is not successful in doing what they try to do,
their economic participation is very small. However,
the World Bank and other institutions had insisted
that the government should grow which is quite an
unusual recommendation. Our government is so small,
if I am not wrong less than 8% of GNP is tax income
for government. That means that the private sector
is very free to do what they want to do. |
How should Guatemala change the image worldwide and who is responsible?
Well, we all are responsible and I can say the only way to change a perception is by demonstrating something many times over because once somebody has a first impression it's very difficult to change it.
How do you plan on bringing all the people from the US, Mexico and Latin America to the convention. What is your communication strategy?
We will have many strategies but one of them is to take LA and NY. Those states have a big representation of Guatemalans and Salvadoran. Many of them want an excuse to come to their countries and visit relatives. We plan to have charter flights from those locations and we are going to target very closely those people and tell them the opportunities they have to develop new companies based on the internet. That is people in LA and their families in Guatemala can do business by internet.
The target group is Central America, US and Mexico?
As a matter of fact we are focusing on a little more than that. We are expecting approximately 800 or 900 participants from Guatemala, 400 from San Salvador, probably 100 from Costa Rica and hopefully 500 to 600 from Mexico City, around 400 from different US cities, mostly LA (we are not targeting Miami). We are calling our event a face to face with 25,000 entrepreneurs in the internet e-commerce space and 25,000 business ideas. It's not impossible to do that because if you go to the internet you see that almost all the web sites are in English so you take each one and translate them to Spanish and that's a business opportunity. It's also a two way window, meaning US people can come to Latin America and Guatemala City and if it is too small they can go to Shell, IBM and to other companies in 24 hours and you cannot do that in US and Mexico.
Are you expecting participation of top companies?
The situation in a small country is usually that almost only the top companies matter. I would like to emphasize that this convention is still a project and we are going to say that it is a full going project from the first days of February because by then we will have brochures and we will distribute them.
What kind of image does SUMA have here?
The first perception SUMA created in the country was that we exchange things. The good thing is that when someone has something strange they usually call us; that is for example we need to do strategic planning sessions with 12,000 participants at the same time and they call us to have our idea. The second probably is computers. Since we usually carry the running computer for our presentations, people usually see us as a computer and technology forerunner and it's usually a fixed image with them.
What would you like to see happen, what are your personal goals with SUMA, in five years?
I had a very strong hope for a long time to do something really important and that is the reason the patterns came to be. I saw that you have rich and poor countries and rich countries have more money and more knowledge and so it's very difficult to bring in more money but there are so many mechanisms for bringing in the knowledge, which makes a lot of sense, how can you do that? With computers. You have to create a large collection of knowledge and then you have to help people communicate with the computers and in intelligent ways learn from the computers. The very long-term plan for the intelligent artificial patterns is talking boxes, we call them chatting moms. Those little boxes are going to be connected to the internet by night and during the day business are going to bring them to the country site while they are working they are talking with a little box and they are going to be learning. That project is my dream. We have very different goals short term and long term like the boxes. Our company is very small and being small we hope we can do a lot.
What will be your message for our readers to come to Guatemala?
Guatemala is a land of experiences, you are going to be able to enrich your view of the world and get closer to people of many different backgrounds and find new ways for doing business with Latin America than anywhere else.
*** NOTE Forbes Global/World Investment News Ltd will not be held responsible for unedited manuscripts at the time of publication.*** |
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