FIJI’S alcoholic beverage producer — Paradise Beverages — has noted a decrease in the total number of beer sales in the past couple of years.
General manager of Paradise Beverages (Fiji) Ltd Mike Spencer said the company was squeezed into a position where they were not making as much profit as a business that they could be doing.
Hence, Mr Spencer said they were looking at export opportunities as well.
“If you look at our Fiji Bitter and Fiji Gold, the last couple of years the total number of beer sales has gone down and that is because people have just got a certain amount of money to spend and they will still spend that some money on alcohol but they cant buy as much volume because the prices are too high, which means we make less products,” he said.
Mr Spencer also said the tax imposed on alcohol has had a massive impact on their business.
“It has massive impacts on my business, with excise we are if not the highest we are one of the highest taxing government in the world for alcohol tax, so we have to contend with that and at the same stage we have to put a price to our own market that people can afford, so the cost of our product to the public is going up significantly because of the excise tax but we can’t afford to pass that on to our consumers because they can’t afford our product.
“We are exporting our drinks to other countries because we don’t pay tax on that.”
He said the company has had several meetings with the Government for the past few years to discuss this issue.
“We have had a lot of meeting with the Government for the past few years which we had to explain that we are the company that has been here for the past more than 60 years and that the current tax on the product is hurting us as a company.
“This is also making people make their own because they still want to drink some alcohol, move to making homebrew which is something that is not very healthy, so instead of purchasing a high quality product they are making their own, and that comes with all sorts of problems, we’ve seen it through the Pacific,” he added.
