36 BCBusiness SEptEmBER 2018 RAE fUNg At Sw fINE ARtS
the company's fresh seafood gets served to
Asian diners three days out of the ocean. In
Hong Kong, another client is the City Super
grocery chain, and regular visitor Johansen
does demos at House of Fine Foods' local
stores. "Every trip I go over there, we seem
to have two or three things on the go with
the British Columbia trade o•ce," he says.
"It's a big help for us."
With Hong Kong accounting for a small
but growing portion of Organic Ocean's rev-
enue, he, business partner Dane Chauvel
and their dozen staff have no plans to
expand into Greater China—for now,
anyway. "We're not really looking to the
mainland because there's only so much
good stuŠ," Johansen explains.
Totem Media's Baker, who has fewer
than 20 employees and draws on a global
network of part-time staŠ and freelancers,
thinks Hong Kong could be the right choice
for B.C. companies with a limited budget
and risk appetite. Most businesses that set
up shop there aim to have a mainland pres-
ence, he says, but for anyone coming from
Canada, the city oŠers a decent market.
"If you're a medium-size company here
and you don't want to tackle a behemoth
like the U.S. or China, then Hong Kong
might be a really interesting option, know-
ing that the bene—t is pretty tight alignment
with Canada and a•nity for Canada."
For companies that have thrived in rela-
tively small countries, cracking the main-
land is a huge task, Baker explains. "It's a
bigger undertaking than trying to enter the
U.S., for sure, because apart from language,
culture and regulations, you've got a situ-
ation in China where it's a bigger market,
there's more big cities, and there's also
many times the number of competitors in
China in any given segment."
Besides, too many businesses under-
estimate how diŠerent Hong Kong is from
Greater China, Baker says. Sending man-
agement there and assuming you can just
leap to the mainland won't cut it, he warns:
"It's as big a jump as it would be to say, Oh,
we're going to penetrate the U.S., but we're
going to set up our o•ce in Vancouver."
Baker came to Hong Kong in 2000,
spending seven years in the city before
moving to Beijing for a similar stretch. He's
seen Hong Kong lose manufacturing and
shipping to the mainland; even its main-
stays, banking and real estate, have slowly
been shifting away, he says. Between 1993
and last year, the city's contribution to Chi-
nese
GDP plunged from a peak of 27 percent
to less than 3 percent. "It's increasingly less
of a regional hub," Baker says.
Although he expects that decline to con-
tinue, he doesn't foresee China making big
changes to Hong Kong. "Somebody who's
super negative about that relationship and
the prospects of Hong Kong would say that
OpEN FOR BusINEss
Hong Kong can be a showcase for
B.C. products, says provincial trade
and investment representative
Derrick Lee
