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Interview: New Zealand business gaining greater understanding of China: minister

Xinhua, May 17, 2016 Adjust font size:

New Zealand businesses are becoming "embedded" in China's economy as the relationship matures, Minister of Business, Innovation and Employment Steven Joyce said on Tuesday.

New Zealand businesses were ramping up their understanding of Chinese business culture, but more needed to be done to help the next generation of entrepreneurs understand other business cultures, Joyce told Xinhua at the Tripartite Economic Summit of Auckland, Guangzhou and Los Angeles.

Joyce, who earlier challenged business and political leaders of the three cities to make their universities more "international," said business students were competing in a global economy and needed some understanding of the cultures they would be working with.

"The Chinese have this desire to build an entrepreneurial culture and get a whole lot of small businesses and things happening in China. We probably have that culture to some degree already and in the U.S. so it's about making sure those connections are made early on," he said.

"For the Chinese, they look at some of the approaches of Western businesses and it takes them a little bit of time to get the hang of that."

New Zealand businesses had improved their understanding of Chinese business cultures in the last three or four years.

"I think we're much more embedded in the Chinese economy - some of our companies - than they were four years ago," said Joyce.

"A lot of bigger New Zealand exporters have their own operations in China, they have their own businesses, they have their own understanding of social media and those sorts of things," he said.

"That is by necessity because they had to learn quite quickly, but I think the maturity of those relationships is far more than it was five years ago and that's probably the maturing of the trade relationship into a trade and investment relationship and a greater understanding."

However, his university challenge to business and political leaders was "about how we can accelerate that understanding with the next generation of entrepreneurs coming through." Endit