Roundup: Maori businesses taking strategic view with China partnerships

New Zealand's indigenous Maori businesses are seeking a breakthrough in getting to understand their Chinese partners at a summit of city leaders in New Zealand's biggest city of Auckland.

Maori political and business leaders have been a significant presence at the Tripartite Economic Summit involving Auckland, southern China's Guangzhou and Los Angeles of the United States.

The summit was an event to talk and make relationships, said Glenn Wilcox, deputy chairman of Auckland City Council's Independent Maori Statutory Board.

"For Maori, much like Asian communities, relationships are much more important than anything else," Wilcox said in an interview with Xinhua.

"Without relationships you don't make business, without relationships and deep faith in each other you can't go forward. The real purpose for us as Maori is that we develop the relationships," he said.

"The business and that other part that goes with business, financial, that create commerce, that comes later. For us as Maori, it's about explaining who we are and how we can make those relationships with people on a one-on-one basis."

Many Maori businesses were owned by iwi, or tribal groupings, and their way of doing business was similar to the Chinese, which often helped facilitate understanding.

"Our relationships with American companies, especially with Los Angeles, usually come through a Hawaiian connection and that Polynesian connection, so in that way, it's more of a Western style of commerce, the relationship is not treated as so important and there's that cultural gap there that doesn't exist when we deal with Chinese people," said Wilcox.

His own iwi had businesses supplying milk, meat, forest products, wool and other products to China, but too often they traded through intermediaries.

"It's not enough. We'd like to be dealing with them more directly, one to one. There always seem to be intermediaries in between and those companies are not necessarily operating the way we like to operate," said Wilcox.

"We'd like to be selling direct to the Chinese," he said.

"That's very important to us, to understand where your food, where your meat comes from and I think Chinese are the same. It's important to understand the relationship we have with animals with that whole ecosystem that we deal with."

Representatives from South Island-based food and beverage firm Kono had also come to Auckland to make relationships with China.

Kono had recently established a wholly-foreign-owned enterprise in Shanghai with the aim of expanding their operations in China, business development manager Andy Elliot said in an interview with Xinhua.

The iwi-owned company was exporting wine, mussels and oysters to China and aiming to get other high-value products into the market.

"It's been a strategic investment that the company has chosen to make. Now that we've got that there we're hoping to increase our staff and our presence and looking to form a lot more collaborative business," said Elliot.

"Just understanding the business has been the biggest hurdle. Things don't happen that quickly, but being a Maori-owned company we have a long-term strategic view of these things so the investment we're making now is for the future."

Elliot echoed the view that Maori businesses had an advantage in sharing a similar commercial culture with China.

"A lot of Maori business is based on relationships and understanding the partners they want to work with, so I think there's a lot of similarities in culture," said Elliot.

"That's an advantage for us. It's something the Chinese value as well, long term partnerships." Endit