Rick Harriss: Kiwis love Kiwis

Living in Hong Kong, it is interesting to watch New Zealand through the window, so to say. With the high dollar, Kiwis has an opportunity of their lifetime to go out and compete and sell their products. It makes it cheap to travel, sell and promote.

Others are already doing it. A Japanese company is packaging milk in Tokyo and sending it to Shanghai, where it sells like hotcakes for six times the price of local milk. A Swedish backed Mongolian company is packaging milk in Mongolia and sending it to Chongqing, three days on a train, where it sells for nearly three times the locally produced milk. A Swedish company selling chocolate in Chengdu for 10 times the price of local products.

Where are the Kiwis? They seem to be sitting at home, moaning at each other about the exchange rate that does not allow any longer for selling on a discount. They have conferences with each other, assuring each other about their potential, and handing each other prices and accolades for reinventing the wheel, as they have done the last quarter of a century. Nobody seems to want to get their hands dirty.

I went on a trip to Chongqing in western China recently. The place is rocking with activity, 12 % annual growth, foreign companies enjoy huge tax breaks, and the subsidies are equally enormous. Where are the Kiwi’s? I went looking for them. I guess they are represented by the 15 or so packages of New Zealand butter in largest wholesale market in this town of 40 million people.

Only one Kiwi lives there, Bert Felt. He owns and runs a local consultancy and service company for exporters and importers, and an Expat businessmen’s club. He told me the place is teaming with people from Japan and EU, but nearly no activity at all from New Zealand. Two years ago he set up a Dutch environmental company to operate in Chongqing. When he suggested a dinner to the manager recently the answer was, “Love to - but - sorry no time. Things gone crazy.”

A Swedish SME company came to have a nose around last year, liked what they heard and saw, and the wheel chair bound owner simply whacked NZ$ 5,000 cash on the table with the words, “For this I want a market research, and a strategy plan how to make money here. Can you do it?” He obviously knew how to do business, and after only nine months he is doing well.

Bert says that he only wish New Zealand business couch potatoes would stop moaning and bleating and do something instead. The opportunities are staggering in the New Zealand prime industries as dairy and agriculture, forestry and wood products, and electrical vehicles has just been promoted as a future prime industry looking for foreign partners. Where the hell are the Kiwis?

Rick Harriss,
Kiwi in Hong Kong. Rick Harriss,
Kiwi in Hong Kong. Rick.harriss@hotmail.com

- Rick Harriss is a New Zealand born freelance journalist and freelance photographer, now retired and living and working in Hong Kong. He can be contacted at rick.harriss@hotmail.com

Rick started to photograph and making short films in his early teens using his family’s bellow camera and 8 mm movie camera. He begun to write during his university studies, and was editor in chief for some smaller media publications in his early years. He has later worked in many parts of the world as photographer, writer, documentary maker, TV producer, free lance journalist, and columnist. Over the years he learned to speak several languages and lived in several cultures and countries.

Several years ago he made Hong Kong his home, to some degree in despair over the lack of freedom of speech, the political correctness, and the political influence and manipulation of the media in New Zealand.

He is a very private and a family man enjoying mostly to write about people and cultures and to document them in his photography.

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