Business View Magazine - November 2016

58 Business View Magazine - November 2016 can buy one bottle. “A ten-dollar bottle of wine at Pric- eSmart is fourteen or fifteen dollars most other places. If you drink one bottle of wine a month, you’re going to save over $50 a year, just on wine. Same if you need tires for your car, a TV, a computer, home appliances, tools, and all kinds of other things that you don’t have to buy in bulk. Our membership is $35 per year and I would be pretty hard-pressed to say that you couldn’t save that in a year. Our average members save at least five times their membership annual fee.” That $35 membership fee accounts for over 50 per- cent of PriceSmart’s total income, according to Naylon, who reports that the company’s gross revenue for the last fiscal year topped $2.82 billion. As for the future, Naylon says PriceSmart is closing in on the purchase of a new 325,000 square foot distribution center in Miami, about a mile from its current, leased facility. “We’re currently operating out of two buildings in Mi- ami and this new facility will bring us all under one roof and it includes a cross docking set up that we don’t currently have”. “We’re also going to continue to penetrate the markets that we’re in,” he continues. “We got into Colombia in 2011; we opened another store in ’12 and another in ’13. And then, in ’15, we opened three including our first club in Bogota. And we just recently opened our seventh location in a suburb of Bogota. Right now, Co- lombia has the most number of clubs and we think it has the demographics to continue growing. So, we’re going to focus on markets that we’re in, but still keep our eyes open for new countries.” Regarding its business model, Naylon says that an on- going pursuit is PriceSmart’s determination to keep driving down sales prices by driving down costs. “In order to get low prices, you have to have low costs,” he states, matter-of-factly. “So, you have to continue to find ways to create efficiencies in our business – in