26th June 2013
UK Trade & Investment Conference in Sydney
Last week our Trade and Investment teams from across Australia and New Zealand gathered in Sydney for their annual conference.
It’s a big part of what we do: they comprise around 1/3 of my Australia staff. All but three are locally hired. Last year the trade team assisted over 1200 companies, introduced 387 companies to new business opportunities, briefed 446 clients through webinars, helped secure £161m of Oil & Gas related contracts and recorded some of the highest customer satisfaction ratings in UKTI’s Global network.
They also helped to contribute to UK exports to Australia passing £10bn for the first time in 2012. The investment team did great work too, in helping 48 companies to invest in the UK who will create over 5000 jobs.
Nick McInnes, our Consul General in Sydney heads the UKTI operation in both Australia and New Zealand. Like most matrix organisations the teams have both functional and geographical reporting lines. So it is very useful to get them together once a year to exchange best practice and develop strategies to meet their targets, which get more demanding each year.
We are also increasingly focusing on developing a campaign approach to the largest commercial opportunities: of course this is what the Defence Sales part of UKTI has already been doing for a long while. And we discussed plans for several GREAT branded marketing events over the next year.
We had a useful session with local counterparts AUSTRADE and NZTE. There are some important synergies. Australian companies which AUSTRADE helps to export may become investors creating jobs in the UK whom we would help. And vice versa.
We also had some good external speakers providing briefing on overseas Infrastructure investment by Australian institutions, which we are increasingly targeting, and a training session on negotiating skills.
Our High Commissioner in New Zealand, Vicki Treadell, and I participated in the conference. We both have experience of working in UKTI earlier in our careers, so we remain closely engaged in their work. Like all the other participants I think we came away re-energised on this important agenda.