New Zealand jumps from trade “Beggar’s table” to “Top Table,” -- Napier Engineering’s Ken Evans

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Doors fly open with global re-alignment. But payment and copying pitfalls still haunt manufacturers & production engineers

Napier, MSCNewsWire, Monday 11 July 2016 - Global trade opportunities have now expanded to a magnitude greater than at any time in the working life of anyone currently engaged in the workforce declared Napier-based industrialist Ken Evans.

The key that had turned global markets to the advantage of New Zealand was Britain’s pending exit from the EU. This meant inevitably a return to the Imperial or Commonwealth preference era which had been the foundation of New Zealand’s prosperity.

This in turn, he said, would accelerate the progress of the New Zealand/EU Free Trade Agreement. The likelihood of this he noted was emphasised by the EU’s drive to install a free trade agreement with Canada.

Canada’s primary industry, notably the dairy sector, was as highly protected as France’s. In comparison New Zealand offered the attraction of a protection-free partnership with the EU.

Noting the existing FTA with China, and the more recent one with South Korea, Mr Evans warned however that for New Zealand manufacturers and production engineers there remained serious obstacles in the pathway of multilateral business. These were, he said:-

· The absence of a fully-fledged standalone Export Import bank or Export Credit Guarantee organisation · The continuing problem of copying, especially by supposed buyers in emergent nations teasing out drawings, models, and other such specifications in the course of phony extended tendering or other bidding procedures · Disguised barriers to trade designed to keep out imported machinery such as those represented by health and safety.

Mr Evans is head of Napier Engineering the manufacturer of the Niven Series of food processing equipment which is exported worldwide.

He said that in slightly over 40 years New Zealand had made the trade transition from what he described as the “beggars table,” to the “top table.”

The begging era was in the 1970s when New Zealand diplomats and exporters sought to hang onto the old UK market as the UK joined the EU or Common Market as it was then known.

Nowadays in contrast, New Zealand was entering an era in which the UK and the EU were both laying out the “trade red carpet,” as Mr Evans described it.

He warned though that while the global trade doors were “flying open” there were lurking behind them the same concealed problems that had handicapped the first manufactured exports drive in the 1970s, notably that of extracting payment.

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