Saturday, September 27, 2003

Now that I'm back and only being away for less than a week, I'm getting an ear full of new challenges we are facing here.

For example, my stone business is facing the biggest challenge yet, with a recent increase in the price of granite, which last month had a 100% increase in cost.

It seems that last September, the largest granite mine was privatized, as was the largest stone-processing factory in Stepanagert by an Armenian investor from Switzerland. The same investor owns the watch factory, a large share in the Artsakh Bank and the Karabagh hotel.

On top of this increase of unprocessed granite, they have also dropped the price for grave-stones by 30%.

So how does this effect me? Well it mean that I have to increase the price of my finished product, which I wont say puts me out of being competitive, but in a way does and makes my profit almost nothing.

And how has this increase in the cost of stone and the drop in price for grave-stones effected the small factories that have been around for years? Well from what I'm told, if they try to compete with the Swiss owned company, they loose money. A few have chosen to close their doors.

And why has the Swiss-Armenian done this? Well to tell you the truth and from what I've heard, he does not even know this has happened and it's his local partners that have done this to get all the stone carvers to come work for them, I say this as they recently advertised for the need of 20+ stone carvers.

And what am I going to do? Well I'm now investigating the possibility of renting a granite mine myself and working it so I can eventually sell stone to the small operators at the more reasonable price and also make it possible for me to be competitive in the international market.

For those of you that might say that the price increase could be due to the real cost of removing granite from the mine, would have to agree that if that was the case, then the price of grave-stones should have also increased, rather than decreased. It's clear that the stone factory that is selling the grave-stones at 30% less than the old price, is doing so as it's not costing them much money for the raw material and they are doing it to cause the experienced stone carvers to not be able to continue to work and have no other choice but to close their business and work for the Swiss-Armenian or move to another country to work.

In short, I'm seeing a Diaspora-Armenian who claims to be very patriotic, is doing more harm than good and in the end causing great harm to the stone-carvers who took the risk and investment to go into business for themselves, not to mention ruining his name here. How very sad.

If I was the Swiss-Armenian, I would be concentrating on new international markets and not steal the domestic markets from the natives. To me it looks like someone coming in from the outside with big money and in a sense, enslaving the people here who fought and spilled their blood for the right to a free and prosperous life.

If anyone of you know this Swiss-Armenian, you may want to mention that he should take the time to look into this issue, since I really think if he knew about it, he would put an immediate stop to it.

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