With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/325830
59.6% bcbusiness.ca July 2014 BCBusiness 141 $10.3 billion during the same nine-year period. Teresa Wat is B.C.'s minister for international trade. She says the gov- ernment has been working for years to help businesses diversify into Asian markets. The province's Forestry Inno- vation Investment ( FII), for example, set up an office in Shanghai in 2003 to promote B.C.'s wood products. "We have been very aggressive in getting our lumber industry's presence in China," Wat says. "We have suc- ceeded in convincing certain jurisdic- tions in China to change their building codes so that the builders can use our wood, our lumber, to build houses." Those exports helped shield B.C.'s forestry industry from some of the worst of the U.S. housing downturn. In 2013, Wat says, just over 40 per cent of B.C.'s lumber exports went to the U.S., while just under 40 per cent went to China. Wat says B.C. has been engaging in Asian trade missions and working with the federal government to negotiate free trade agreements like the one Canada completed (but hasn't yet rati- fied) with South Korea this year. Her government is trying to blaze a trail for industry. HSBC's Watt says he's unsure if those trade missions have borne much fruit, noting that competitors such as the European Union, the U.S. and Australia have been ahead of Canada in signing trade deals, and in actual trade. "It is certainly a situation that if we don't start to take advantage of the opportunities that are going to be aris- ing, other people will," he says. B.C., for example, is making a concerted push to develop a liquefied natural gas ( LNG) industry, but Austra- lia and the U.S. are already exporting products while B.C.'s industry is still on the drawing board. By 2019, when the bulk of B.C.'s LNG exports will begin hitting the markets, Australia and the U.S. are projected to have surpassed Qatar as the world's number one and two LNG exporters, respectively. Watt says Canada should also examine what its customers in emerg- ing markets will be demanding in the future. There will be opportunities in those markets beyond the natural resources they are consuming now. "There is going to be an important rotation in these nations away from competing with cheap labour to actu- ally being more consumer-like," Watt says. "And as that transition unfolds, growth levels go up, consumer spend- ing tastes and the industrial nature of these economies can shift. So that's where we start looking for the oppor- tunities." • Thinking about your company and your career, what language(s) other than English would be most advantageous to learn? 36.4% 38.4% 17.8% 9.8% 5.8% 1.8% 14.7% 9.8% French spanish Mandarin Hindi arabic Portuguese bengali Japanese Other 11-25% 19.4% 76% or more 18.8% 51-75% 12.5% 26-50% 17.7% 10% or less 31.6% What percentage of your business is outside of Canada? n=550 n=288 p138-146-HSBC_advertorial.indd 141 2014-05-29 10:07 AM