Strong demand from US consumers ahead of Valentine’s Day is bringing Colombia’s flower industry back from the brink of collapse.
Exports have been picking up since September, boding well for Feb. 14, the biggest day in the calendar for florists. Strong sales this weekend would set the seal on the industry’s comeback.
Colombian growers were getting ready for Mother’s Day when the pandemic tore through the US last spring. With massive markets such as New York and California locked down, Colombia’s flower producers destroyed thousands of tonnes of roses, carnations and chrysanthemums.
Photo: Reuters
There was more bad news to come. When summer arrived, US couples started canceling their weddings. Even funeral sales were not good, due to restrictions on gatherings. Most of the cut flowers sold in the US come from Colombia, and the sector looked set for mass bankruptcies and job losses.
Instead, it saw a major recovery. As the pandemic progressed, people in the US got into the habit of sending each other flowers when they could not meet face to face, and also bought more blooms to brighten up their homes, Kate Penn, chief executive officer of the Society of American Florists, said in a phone interview.
And since they could not easily spend their money on vacations, restaurants or concerts, some households found themselves with more disposable income than normal.
“I’ve definitely talked to florists whose event work, which basically was almost nothing, was more than offset by the everyday interest in flowers,” Penn said.
After crashing 25 percent in June, when the wedding season starts, Colombian flower exports rebounded in late summer, which is normally a slow period.
For the whole of last year, exports fell just 4 percent, despite the slump earlier in the year.
“Normally, summer is bad, because countries in the northern hemisphere grow their own flowers, but, despite that, exports continued very well, and now they’re doing well, and there’s good demand for Valentine’s day,” said Augusto Solano, head of the Colombian Flower Growers’ Association.
Flowers accounted for US$1.4 billion of the nation’s US$31 billion in exports last year, ranking behind oil, coal, coffee and gold. About 80 percent of Colombian flower exports go to the US.
Large flower companies were relatively unscathed by the downturn, while small ones fared much worse. With contracts to supply retailers such as Walmart Inc, big producers typically sell more than 100 percent of their output, making up the difference with purchases from smaller growers.
Faced with last year’s crisis, they continued to sell their own flowers, but slashed orders from small growers like Carmen Bravo.
Her company, Belen de los Tejares, has 27 employees and grows roses in the heart of Colombia’s flower-producing area in the Andean plain known as the Bogota Savanna. Last year, she saw sales slump by 40 percent.
“Between March 20 and April 20, we had to throw away more or less 220,000 flowers,” Bravo said. “Mother’s Day is the second Sunday of May, but flower shipments are normally three or four weeks earlier, so that was the time of peak production, and there was no market for them.”
Fortunately, Valentine’s Day last year fell before the mass shutdowns and Colombian flower exports in February last year were the strongest ever for the month. Bravo said the money she made then allowed her to weather the crisis, and that sales this year have also been strong.
“Valentine’s day is the key to having a good year. We’ve started the year on a sound footing,” Bravo said.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to