IT company PBS growing fastest in Musson Group, says PB Scott

Paul ‘PB’ Scott, chairman and CEO of regional conglomerate Musson Group, says its publicly listed information technology firm Productive Business Solutions Limited, PBS, is the fastest-growing company in the massive corporation.

It aligns with the dominance of technology companies globally, but bucks the status quo in the region.

Citing that in the past decade the biggest companies in the world have all been from the tech sector, Scott noted this was not the case in the English-speaking Caribbean, where the economies are dominated by banks, insurance and financial institutions and distribution companies.

The Musson Group, which does business in 30 countries and has a workforce of 7,000, also includes companies such as food products manufacturer Seprod and its Trinidadian distribution subsidiary AS Bryden Group; General Accident, which is Jamaica’s largest general insurance company; T. Geddes Grant, which distributes pharmaceuticals, and others.

As for PBS, which is implementing projects in countries across the Caribbean and Latin America: “That business is the fastest-growing business that we have,” said Scott, who is also the chairman of PBS.

The businessman made the comments while delivering the 2024 William G. Demas Memorial Lecture during the Caribbean Development Bank’s 54th Annual Meeting in Ottawa, Canada, on Tuesday.

Scott noted that in 2001, Microsoft was the only tech company among the top five largest companies in the world by market capitalisation, whereas every year since 2016 the top five largest companies were all from the tech industry.

“That shows you that private capital is going to the most productive areas of the economy,” Scott noted.

He also showed that the lists of the top 10 biggest companies in Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago were dominated by banks, financial holding companies, distribution companies and breweries.

Started in 2000, PBS has 3,000 IT professionals operating in Central America and the Caribbean, and represents such tech brands as Google, Xerox, Oracle and Cisco, he said.

Projects implemented by PBS in the region include the development of the traffic ticketing system in Jamaica; the provision of teacher training and vocational workshops to students in Guatemala; the repair of offshore IT platforms in Trinidad and Tobago; providing access to diagnosis to doctors in remote hospitals in Nicaragua; and the delivery of over a million computers to students in El Salvador in conjunction with UNICEF.

Scott indicated that Central American governments were more willing to invest in technology than governments in the Caribbean.

“The governments in the Caribbean are yet to really invest in technology transformation, and that is something we must address. The rest of the world is moving ahead at a very fast pace, and if we don’t get with it our productivity is going to continue to lag,” he said.

“It is only by investing in technology that will develop the efficiencies needed to overcome our lack of scale,” Scott added.

Productive Business Solutions’ assets were last estimated at over US$384 million, reflecting an increase of six per cent over the past year to March.

Subsequent to the quarter, the company struck a deal to acquire Xerox Holdings Corporation’s businesses in Peru and Ecuador, which will make it the exclusive distribution partner for Xerox in those countries, adding to the other markets it already serves as a Xerox partner for over two decades.

The deal is expected to close by the end of June, subject to regulatory approval from the competition authority in Ecuador.

luke.douglas@gleanerjm.com