First Rock sets March date for Guyana start-up
Published:Friday | February 12, 2021 | 12:30 AM
The staff is not yet fully settled in, but by the end of March First Rock Guyana should be up and running.
The Jamaican company’s entry into the Guyanese market was delayed by the pandemic, but things are a bit more certain now, according to CEO of First Rock Capital Holdings Ryan Reid, with two real estate deals close to completion.
“First Rock group is aggressively pursuing opportunities in the real estate and private equity space. On the real estate side, we have two transactions that we will be announcing soon,” said Reid. “We will not say how much is being invested in the real estate side for disclosure reasons, but for the private equity transaction the sum is between US$5 million and US$10 million.”
Guyana First Rock will be managed through an offshore-registered company, First Rock Global Barbados, which is chaired by former prime minister Bruce Golding, with Christopher Young as managing director. Other board members include Ryan Reid, Michael Banbury, Stacy Halsall-Peart and Tanya Waldron-Gooden.
The office will be staffed by a mix of Jamaicans and Guyanese. The entire First Rock group has about 80 staff spread across six jurisdictions: Jamaica, United States, Costa Rica, Cayman Islands, St Lucia, Barbados, and now Guyana.
“Bruce Golding is one of the smartest minds Jamaica has produced and certainly we believe that he has the relationships regionally to help to open doors for First Rock Global Holdings; and through his expertise in business and public service, he will be able to give oversight and governance that First Rock Global Barbados requires,” Reid said.
The former PM is not invested in First Rock nor any of its projects, Reid added, in response to direct questions on the issue.
First Rock Capital Holdings itself is chaired by the CEO’s father, former banker Norman Reid. The nascent company founded in 2017 went public and listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange in February 2020.
In its first year as a listed company, the private equity firm made US$3.7 million, or US$0.013 per share, in profit for its shareholders – a near-fivefold increase over the US$757,000 made in 2019 – which Reid said resulted from big jumps in rentals, interest income and gains on investments.
Additionally, the company more than doubled its assets year-on-year from US$16 million to US$37 million as at December 2020, its fourth-quarter financial report shows.
“We wanted to close out the year with a certain level of asset allocation on our balance sheet, which we accomplished; and the effort to extract value from our assets, whether through sale or the utilisation of cash for further acquisitions, continues,” Reid said.