By Al Edwards, Business Co-ordinator 
STOCKS, BONDS, government securities if you were building an investment portfolio who would be the best person in Jamaica to seek out?
In the local financial sector, most people in the know will tell you Christopher Berry of Mayberry Investments. He has successfully managed to encourage Jamaicans from all walks of life to invest their money in order to make comfortable returns and in the process has demystified what many people perceive as the exclusive preserve of Wall Street and those "big shots who understand real money".
Mayberry Investments was started by Christopher's father Maurice (who died in 1993) after he left the Bank of Jamaica in 1983. It was always his dream to operate a family business and the end of Maurice Berry's career at the Central Bank provided the opportunity to realise that long held ambition.
Maurice Berry was one of the early investors when the local stock market operation began in the 1960s. He decided to take this area of expertise and form his own investment company. Starting from his home, he worked out a business plan and cash flow projections and began the company in 1985 with J$150,000, the proceeds of leasing three cars owned by the family.
Christopher Berry graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, where he read Industrial Engineering. After his studies, he went to work with the Matalons at ICD and in 1987, he joined the family firm.
So how did Christopher Berry become an investment broker?
"I was running a computer business for the Matalons and when I looked around at the computer business in Jamaica the major companies were IBM and ICL. At that time, ICL was doing about J$30 million a year. We had just started and in less than two years we were doing about J$10 million a year but we were only selling PCs. Not knowing what I know now I figured that this computer business was running out of steam. My father said he wanted help in the new business so I decided to join him in 1987, but as you know the computer business has come on leaps and bounds since then."
In those early days, Mayberry was headed by Maurice and Irwin Angus and the firm was a small operation. Christopher came in to learn the business and to provide his computer knowledge to an industry that was increasingly turning that way. One of the first things he did was to install an up-to-date computer system to make the company more efficient. He spent time in the back office, as well as front office and learned how to value companies and price stocks. It was real on-the-job-training that served him well and prepared him to take over the company in the following decade.
Over the last 17 years, starting with an investment of $150,000, Mayberry Investments is today a company with a capitalisation valued at $400 million. Remarkably, Maurice never spoke to his son Christopher about him taking over and running the company in the future. In fact, Christopher's brother, who once worked with PriceWaterhouseCooopers and was the chief trader for the company, began working at Mayberry from its inception.
Christopher said, "The part of the company I concentrated upon was what do we invest in, and what do we sell our clients. That has been my main interest for the entire time I have been at Mayberry. I don't want to get too involved in the company's administration. The most important thing we do is make money for our clients and that is my main focus."
How does he view the current investor climate?
"I have noticed that the Jamaican investor has become a lot more sophisticated over the last ten years or so. When we started we had to write special pieces on Government securities to explain to the clients what they were, because they only seemed to know what a bank CD was. Today the average investor knows all about Government securities.
"When we started, primarily banks and insurance companies bought Government securities, the ordinary investor knew nothing about those. Today there are so many investor vehicles and people are actively investing and looking for the best returns in town."
Christopher Berry pointed to the fact that many Jamaicans invest in bonds and fixed income securities more so than any other instruments. He said that the reason for that is that people by nature, require a certain degree of certainty and with fixed income securities you know what your return is going to be and you know when your interest and principal are going to be paid. Therefore it is easier for an investor to buy a bond or fixed income security rather than other types of investments where the returns are not clearly specified.
THE JAMAICAN STOCK MARKET
Recently there has been a discernible interest by investors in the Jamaican Stock Exchange (JSE) which Mayberry is keen to encourage. Christopher Berry primarily puts this down to a lowering of interest rates.
"Jamaicans like to make high returns on fixed income instruments. But over the last five years or so, the dollar has been relatively stable making the real returns on fixed income instruments notable but declining," he pointed out. "So as they become lower and lower (the returns that is), people are looking at alternatives to increase their returns, hence the interest in stocks.
"This new found interest in the JSE is reflected in the fact that over the last year, we have almost doubled our members on the JSE, moving from six to ten members. There is a lot of investment news out there, I mean when you pick up the Financial Gleaner, there are so many articles on investments so maybe this preponderance of news is encouraging people to look into the local stock market."
He actively implores more Jamaican companies to list on the JSE, citing it as one of Jamaica's businesses most undiscovered tools. He observes that the requirements to list are not excessively stringent.
"You must have least a hundred shareholders and capital of at least J$200,000 in order to list and I don't think most Jamaican companies would have difficulty with that. Most well run companies today produce managers' monthly accounts so the reporting requirements of the JSE should not be a big hurdle. So you see, the cost of expanding becomes a lot cheaper if you should choose to list rather than going to borrow from the bank which means you have to pay interest. Once you issue stock and shareholders buy it, well that's it, you don't have to contend with fluctuating interest rates and everything else that comes with debt."
He sees the main reason why many companies decide not to list is because Jamaicans do not like other people to know their business and they feel by being a private company they can keep their affairs private. "Jamaicans love to be in control of their destiny and they do not like many other people participating and taking decisions in the running of their companies. There is a fear that people are looking to take their company away from them. So they don't want people to know what they are doing. There is always this thing about secrecy. Many Jamaicans don't want their financial affairs to be public."
JAMAICAN INVESTORS OVERSEAS
With the American stock markets proving turbulent at best recently, many Jamaican investors abroad are looking closer to home.
Christopher Berry noted that despite the recent vagaries of the U.S. markets, it is still the strongest in the world. But like all markets it goes through cycles, though it has been declining for the last two years.
"With the American markets declining for the last two years, a lot of people who traditionally invest abroad are now looking at Jamaica as a place to invest. I would say to them that investing in Jamaican companies can often times prove easier than in American companies because if you are Jamaican, the level of information we have about our own companies far exceeds what is available on the American ones. You just have to see what is going on with Enron, Tyco and Kodak right now. I have found the Jamaican stock market a very reliable way to make money.
"We have some great Jamaican companies that investors abroad should be looking at. You take for instance your own, Gleaner Company,
Jamaica Broilers, Dehring Bunting & Golding, Grace, Kennedy and Radio Jamaica - all fine Jamaican companies worth investing in."
INVESTMENTS SEMINARS
It is hardly surprising that Christopher Berry and his team, took the decision to implement a public awareness programme on how corporations and the stock market with its monthly Mayberry Investments Seminars held at the Courtleigh Hotel, New Kingston.
The seminars have now become mainstays on the local financial calendar and have proven insightful and informative. At this time, their relevance has become even more pertinent with a cry all over the world for greater corporate governance and transparency. "I don't remember who came up with the idea to host the seminars but I can tell you one of the reasons my father started the company was that he realised that financial knowledge was something that separated a lot of ordinary people from being comfortable. He believed that one of the main roles of the company is to deciminate information so that people can use it for their own personal benefit. So we believe in getting the word out and educating the public in the ways how companies operate and how money works and what are their financial options. That's how the seminars fit into what we do and is a key part because we try to get the best speakers in Jamaica to talk about subjects that will help investors. We want the seminars to be informative but fun."
MAYBERRY'S FUTURE
Mayberry's client base is growing rapidly and now stands at 4,000 with assets under management of about $15 billion but its boss Christopher Berry has no plans to make acquisitions or merge it with another investment house. The company's assets last year grew by 45 per cent. He said that just keeping up with the growth is a challenge and that remains the company's focus.
JAMAICA'S FINANCIAL SECTOR
"The financial sector is now in recovery mode after going through several horrible years. We are now a lot more regulated and we are working towards making it a safer and profitable environment for all of us. We must remain focused on that and I think once we do everything will be OK," he said.
Mr. Berry added: "The Government has done a fantastic job of bringing down interest rates to where they are today. Based on my numbers I'm surprised they have them this low. I think the big challenge for Jamaica is how do we generate growth so we can restructure our balance sheet, get a better rating and see interest rates fall even lower. Interest rates in Jamaica are constrained by our minimal growth and inability to earn and unless we make a significant impact on that it is unlikely that interest rates will fall further. Our leaders must make the growing of our economy its top priority and they must make the country understand that it is a priority. We Jamaicans have achieved many great things and when we make something a priority, we can do it. I don't thing that the growth of the economy has however been made a priority. The growth of the economy is the only way that we can make meaningful improvement in the standard of living for all Jamaicans on a sustainable basis."
Married to Patricia, one of Jamaica's leading dermatologists, the couple has a daughter (aged 4) and a son (aged 5). Despite being a successful investment manager, Christopher Berry finds time to indulge his hobbies: tennis and model car racing.
"When I not spending time with the clients I'm spending time with the kids. I was lucky in the sense that as a child I had a rich family life and I think that had a positive impact on me and that is something that I would like to pass on to my children in the best way I can. I think in Jamaica we should spend a lot more time imparting family values to our children because it affects our lives in so many ways. If you have a cohesive family unit, when the parents of that family expires they will have assets to pass on to those who are left so they don't have to start off from scratch. So after so many generations the family asset base can turn out to be a substantial sum. So you see that's where the wealth of a nation starts, so an improvement in that area should be to the benefit of Jamaica."
