Treasurer’s Report
Roy Gardiner
The year was exciting for Coschem. The
member’s support of the various offerings of
Coschem has helped with our Income, This
remains key to the successful operating of
Coschem. We have been fortunate to have held
our ground despite our politicians treating our
economy without respect and still managed to
generate a small surplus. Our concern again was
the uncertainty of membership renewal due to
the economic downturn, the continually changing
exchange rate and an unstable economy. We are
very grateful to those members and companies
that continue to support us during these testing
times. I must emphasise our gratitude and
again thank them for their contributions.
The three major areas that generated the funds
required to operate our office were the
Membership subscriptions, Education
Programme and our local Scientific Conference.
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Membership remains fairly stable and efforts
to maintain this level are being addressed.
We continue to contribute to the
membership of the IFSCC and to P & C
Review and encourage you to use these
publications. The Social Committee has also been very
active and contributed very positively with
the Golf Day, Ladies Day and the newly
introduced Men’s day. The key driver
(pardon the pun) is networking within the
industry.
The Education Programme continues to be
a contributor to the generation of funds. The
course is seen to be of value to the
industry and we continually strive to improve
this image. We are honoured to have an
educational team who unselfishly give of
their time and expertise. We had to make use of legal council on
three occasions. The first was to protect the
Coschem name that a company had
adopted. The second was to register and
trademark our name and logo and the final
legal issue was to defend ourselves from two
students. We continued to use the services
of FTR and a bookkeeper to ensure proper
accounting practices. FTR is a mine of
valuable information and it has been a
privilege to work with them.
The Scientific Committee had a number
of post graduate students from our local
universities adding to the research of our
local botanicals as active ingredients for our
industry. We decided to again hold
registration to minimal rates to improve
attendance, but again this did not show an
improvement. Our offer to assist members
who wished to present papers at the Munich
Congress had a student take up the offer
when her paper was accepted by the IFSCC.
Serina Sowman, a second year student of
our correspondence course and an MSc
student for the University of KZN was
sponsored to attend the Congress.
The small surplus for the year will be used in
future projects which will support the aims of
the society by increasing its educational and
scientific offering.
Finally I would like to thank Coschem
members for the faith they had in me. It was
an honour and privilege to have served you.
Seminars held during the year on industry
topics were very successful. Congratulations
to this committee for exceeding the budget.
The additional funds were directed to im-
proving the sound and webinar facilities. We
hope this will attract members to our future
seminars.
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