Today, we publish the fifth of 15 stories on the nominees for the Jamaica Observer Business Leader Corporate Award. To be considered for nomination, all companies had to be at least 50 years old, or be able to trace their roots to 1962 or before. The award presentation and announcement of the Business Leader Corporate will take place on Sunday, December 2 at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in Kingston.

SALEEM Mahfood, a Lebanese peasant, arrived here in 1921, having traced the footsteps of other penniless compatriots who had left their homeland in search of a better life.

He was ambitious and hard-driven, and by 1935 broke loose of his uncles’ employment to start his own haberdashery on Harbour Street in downtown Kingston. He named it eponymously — Mahfood’s Commercial — perhaps a signal to the competition that the new kid on the block intended to plant his feet deep into Jamaican soil.

By the standards of colonial Jamaica, Mahfood’s Commercial was a success. It distributed goods to retailers — shoes, including the once popular BATA and Cebo water boots; clothes; and a range of household items.

Goods manufactured in the USA, UK, Czechoslovakia, and Hong Kong found their way onto the shelves of retail stores all over the country, thanks to the initiative of this Lebanese-turned Jamaican businessman.

Saleem died in February 1962, six months before Jamaica gained Independence from Britain. He left behind a distribution company that sold £200,000 worth of merchandise that year — by no means an insubstantial enterprise.

But his greatest legacy was his four sons — Saleem (Sam), Ferdinand, Joe and Robin. All of them already had some involvement in the family business when their father passed away, and they wasted no time in building on their heritage.

The patriarch would be flabbergasted by how the seeds that he sowed three generations ago have prodigiously blossomed.

The Wisynco Group is the end result of this long process of corporate germination and its profile today would make its forerunner very proud.

This company is a manufacturer, distributor and exporter of a wide range of goods, from drinks and plastic products, to ice cream and pizza. It is the foundation on which one of the world’s most far-reaching charitable organisations — Food For The Poor — was created.

For the financial year ended June 30, 2012, the Wisynco Group posted $13 billion in gross turnover.

The impressive revenue is undergirded by an operation that is nothing short of breathtaking in scale and impact.

This company operates out of 444,350 square feet of factory, warehousing and office space primarily at Twickenham Park, near Spanish Town, St Catherine. During the 12 months to June this year, 10 million cases of merchandise rolled off its multiple conveyor belts. It now handles 2,500 different types of products — technically referred to in the trade as skus — ranging from brands that it produces at its factory, to goods that others make but for which it has distributorship.

The workforce of 1,796, including contractors, places this firm very, very high within the ranks of top employers of labour in Jamaica. Of course, a key enabling factor in its capacity to provide jobs for so many is the nearly $2 billion that the Mahfood family invested in its expansion and modernisation over the past six years.

West Indies Synthetics was formed in 1963 as a leading-edge responder to the Government’s singular charge to the private sector: help us build an industrial economy so that we may lift the masses out of deep-seated poverty.

By all the social and economic indices — housing, education, infrastructure, and national income — the country was mired in poverty. But Jamaicans were teeming with a collective optimism and a sense of shared responsibility for the future, stemming from political Independence in August 1962.

Robert Lightbourne, a slender man with wavy hair and deep-set eyes, had returned from England with a reputation as a passionate industrialist. He became the public face of Sir Alexander Bustamante Government’s missionary drive towards industrialisation.

Lightbourne had in place the Industrial Incentive Scheme to woo indigenous entrepreneurs like the Mahfoods into value-added production. The scheme was managed by the Jamaica Industrial Development Corporation.

The Mahfoods recall the day they set out on their journey as a manufacturer. In 1963, a man they now remember only as a “Mr Hannah” approached Sam, then head of the family company, flogging the blue print for the manufacture of water boots.

Mr Hannah wanted £7 — lots of money, but Sam had a vision of being part of the new Jamaica so he took the deal. The package included industrial incentives, feasibility study, plus all the technical specifications for the equipment and processes involved in converting rubber into footwear.

Wisynco borrowed £150,000 from the National Commercial Bank (then Barclays) to build and equip a 6,000-square-foot factory at Twickenham Park in St Catherine. The plant could produce 30 pairs of boots per hour. The land came at a concessionary rate — an entitlement under the Industrial Inventive Scheme.

Soon farmers, casual labourers, factory workers, and anyone seeking added protection from the elements would be sporting Jamaican-made Iron Man water boots.

Initially Wisynco introduced double shift to keep up with the growing demand, and when that was not enough, expanded its production line.

It did not take long for this company to launch into the manufacture of plastic goods, a move that exponentially increased the range and volume of household products that it could now supply to the local market. The Gator brand of footwear was among the most popular products that rolled off its production line.

An admirable hallmark of the Wisynco corporate culture has been its willingness to take risks and to double-down on investments even while others are in retreat from the Jamaican market.

Factory space increased to 8,000 square feet by the middle of the 1960s, and by the end of that decade to 20,000 square feet. Growth continued even during the 1970s when several other investors pulled out of Jamaica because of their disagreement with the policies of the then Administration. In fact, by the end of that decade, Wisynco required 60,000 square feet of production space in order to supply the Jamaican market with its expanding range of products.

If you fast-forward to today, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the impulse and appetite for risk-taking demonstrated by the first two generations of Mahfoods, appears to be embedded deep inside the DNA of the current generation who are now — except for Joe who remains chairman — at the helm of this company. (Sam died in 2003).

Between 2006/07 the company spent $540 million to add 260,000 square feet to its warehousing capacity. Two years ago it invested another $720 million to increase the throughput at its bottling plant by 70 per cent and in that same year $157 million on a 24,000 square-foot office complex.

Investment in a waste water treatment facility in 2012 amounted to $158 million, while between this year and 2013 another $378 million is going into expanding output, again.

The manufacturing plants are spread across 160,350 square feet of the company’s total floor space.

William Mahfood, the son of Joe Mahfood, is managing director of Wisynco Group. Sam’s son Andrew is in charge of finance and planning.

Joe says that risk-taking has been one of the bedrocks of the company’s growth.

“For …50 years our company expanded by not paying dividends to shareholders, but by spending its profits in training staff and educating the next generation,” he says. “While we watched our hopes for Jamaica suffer blows we kept focused on our companies’ growth, committed to staff, country, and family.”

Wisynco has been a household name in Jamaica at least since the late 1970s when it and another local firm, Thermoplastics Ltd, were held up as examples that indigenous manufacturing was in fact still possible in the faltering economy.

But like most other firms, Wisynco has had its fair share of challenges, and throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s has had to make significant changes to its business model to survive.

When William joined the company straight from university in the late 1980s Wisynco had just entered a phase that threatened to unravel the family enterprise.

At the time the firm was made up of the Gator Shoe Company, Wisynco Trading Ltd, West Indies Synthetics, WTL Fisheries Division, Seville Land Development, and Precision Arts Ltd, a printing company. It was an unwieldy conglomeration.

More specifically, the company had to stage a recovery from a series of misguided investments. Forays into fishing, and into bulk rice distribution ended up costing millions of dollars. Generally the non-branded bulk items in which it was heavily invested were no longer profitable product lines.

Gator, the company’s long-standing shoe brand, was a victim of the changing times — eventually succumbing to cheaper foreign imports. So did Iron Man water boots — in 2008.

William says the late 1980s and early 1990s was a period when “we saw our company basically go through one of the toughest periods that Jamaica has ever seen”.

Here is how he remembers it: “During that time we were largely manufacturing plastics and distributing a wide range of commodity-based items such as rice, and bulk detergents, etc. We took the strategic decision to start closing down and exiting some of the businesses that we didn’t feel had much sustainability and also to focus our efforts on very clearly defined businesses/brands, that we felt were going to be around for a long time.”

He attributes the turnaround to a dedicated cadre of staff.

“We have grown to be the single largest beverage company in the country as well as the most important fast-moving consumer goods distribution company,” he says. “We have taken a very specialised/focused business model and turned it into a large enterprise.”

Wisynco is always in search of value-added opportunities. Its approach as a distributor is to go after products that either are leaders within their market segments, or which the company believes it can make the first choice of consumers.

The high-end ice cream and some of its drinks that it sells stand out as examples.

The manner in which Wisynco began manufacturing its popular Bigga line of soft drinks also provides a window into its collective corporate mindset. In 1996, the company having sold in one month, 87,000 cases of the drinks for which it had distribution rights in Jamaica, approached the Trinidadian manufacturers with a plan to produce locally the brands that were being sold here.

The Trinidadians balked at the idea. Wisynco gave up the brands — Carib Shandy, Cole-Cola and Chubby — borrowed US$3 million and set up a 10,000 square-foot drinks manufacturing plant. The company named its drink Bigga. By 2000, it introduced its own brand of purified water — called WATA — on the Jamaican market.

Again when Wisynco lost the dealership for Ocean Spray range of cranberry drinks last year, it did what it knows best: start producing and distributing its own brand of cranberry drinks.

Yet, for Joe, Food For The Poor, the charity started by his brother Ferdinand, will remain one of the more enduring legacies of his company.

“Food For the Poor …now serves 17 countries from profits made in West Indies Synthetics in the early years, and invested in helping the underprivileged,” he says. “This year FFP will distribute over J$180 billion in cash and kind. This has been our real success.”

Moses Jackson is the founder and convenor of the Jamaica Observer annual Business Leader Award programme. He may be reached at moseshbsjackson@yahoo.com