Treasurer’s Report
Roy Gardiner
The three major areas that generated the
funds required to operate our office were the
Membership subscriptions, Education
Programme and our local Scientific
Conference.
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 year was exciting for Coschem. Income
remains key to the successful operating of
Coschem. We have been fortunate to have
held our ground despite our politicians
reducing our economy to junk status. As a
result, the budget that we set was
pessimistic. Our concern 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.
We decided to improve our scientific
offering to our members and had mixed
results. The registration fee for attending the
conference was substantially reduced, but
disappointingly showed no noticeable
increase in attendance. Our offer to assist
members who wished to present papers at
the Seoul Conference had no takers. Holding
costs to a minimum for attending seminars
and workshops also showed little
improvement in attendance. The committees
will work on these areas to attract better
attendance.
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.
The Scientific Committee put in a huge
amount of work to assist our industry by
bringing international expertise to our
conference. We sponsored Randy Wickett, a
well known and respected cosmetic scientist
from the USA, as a guest speaker to boost
the level of science offered. We also 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.
Seminars held during the year on industry
topics were very successful. During the year
we used funds to improve facilities in the
laboratory, purchase equipment and
glassware and add scientific books to our
library. We hope this will attract members to
our offices.
The Social Committee has also been very
active and contributed positively with the Golf
Day and Ladies Day. The key driver (pardon
the pun) is networking within the industry.