Stafford Flooring Ltd has gone international with the opening of a new branch in the Cayman Islands.The company, which has been supplying flooring services to Bermuda for more than 20 years, sees the new branch as being a gateway to potential new business across the Caribbean region.Stafford Flooring president Randy Stafford said business would continue in Bermuda as normal, but that he would be dividing his time between the Bermuda and Cayman operations as he aims to get the new operation established.Having opened at the start of this year, the new branch, based in West Bay, Grand Cayman, has got off to good start and has already attracted a Cayman government contract to provide the flooring for a new high school.Mr Stafford based his decision to branch out into the Caribbean on the belief that his company, with its products and services, could fill a gap in the Cayman market.As in Bermuda, Caymanian law requires dominant local ownership in local businesses and Mr Stafford’s business partner is George Town-based architect Burns Conolly.“Even though the population of Cayman is smaller than Bermuda’s, it has more land space and room to develop,” Mr Stafford said in a telephone interview from Cayman. “The future is still about new construction. In the current economic conditions, a lot of our work in Bermuda will be renovations and improvements.”Bermuda’s construction industry has shed more than 600 jobs over the past two years, according to the National Economic Report 2010, released last month. The industry went through a boom period, but since the completion of a number of major projects in Hamilton, coinciding with a recession, work has contracted sharply.In Grand Cayman, the ongoing construction of Camana Bay, a planned new town, scheduled to take many more years of building, is one of the major projects that persuaded Mr Stafford to make the huge decision to expand beyond Bermuda during a fragile global economic recovery. Also in the works is the Dragon Bay development and the construction of the Shetty Hospital.Planning restrictions have been eased, allowing higher beach front properties. One of the results is the Watercolours development, comprising 60 residential units alongside Seven Mile Beach. Caymanian Premier McKeeva Bush has also proposed building an oil refinery.Cayman’s tourism industry is also seeing signs of revival. A total of 26,445 people flew into the Cayman Islands in January, a 5.8 percent increase on last year and the best figure since 2001. In the full year 2010, Cayman had more than 288,000 air arrivals and nearly 1.6 million cruise ship passengers, both up by more than five percent on the year before.Another good reason for Stafford Flooring to be in Cayman is that it opens up possibilities for doing business in the wider Caribbean region. “A number of our manufacturing partners have asked us to represent them in the Caribbean and we’ve had to tell them that we’re not equipped to do that,” Mr Stafford said.“Now we have a presence in the Caribbean and we are equipped to do it. There are probably about 45 million people in the Caribbean and being down here will bring us opportunities.“The Caribbean is an often overlooked area, particularly in the flooring business.”There are a number of Bermuda companies with a presence in the Caribbean and Mr Stafford hopes to leverage long-standing Bermuda relationships to expand in in the islands.Useful website:www.staffordflooring.com