I attended the UK Trade and Investment "Doing Business in Asia Event". The new Business Secretary Vince Cable gave an excellent "Keynote" address. He highlighted the importance of the Asian market and how Asian growth is changing international trade dynamics. He saw UK expertise and particularly trade with Asia as a key driver for UK economic growth.
In the postal sector countries like China and Korea have been significant postal technology innovators but for some reason Postal Technology events have failed to obtain any traction in the region. There are a number of really excellent Postal Consultancies in the UK but they also find it very difficult to engage with the large Asian markets.
UKTI had arranged for UK Ambassadors and Consul-Generals from Asian markets to hold 1:1 meetings with UK companies interested in doing business in the region. I used these excellent meetings to try and understand the consultancy markets in these countries. The dilema seems to be that "they want UK expertise" but they dont have very well-developed markets for consultancy. The different markets that I discussed seemed to represent slightly different cultural challenges from a consultancy perspective.
My "take-away" from this excellent event is to use the UKTI "in-market" expertise to try and open some doors for me. Triangle are organising a PosTech event in New Delhi in December http://www.triangle.eu.com/conferences/PosTech/default.htm and I suggested to our UK Government representatives in India that we could use this as a trade mission opportunity for UK Postal Consultancy companies and UK Technology companies.
I plan to hold a small webinar on this subject. Let me know if you are interested and would like to take part.
