Business Q&A:
Tony Honey, PNG Forest Products
Q: You seem to be developing a global footprint. How do you select market opportunities and how do you coordinate it?
A: The obvious factor for exports is being competitive and producing products that bring greater value to our business. Through close liaison with our clients we continue to improve our product lines through greater efficiencies and improved quality standards, which enable us to fend off alternative product offerings. Market opportunities come about by being competitive and continuing to develop alternative engineered wood products.
Q: What kind of sales growth are you expecting?
A: We see substantial growth in our power business simply by being competitive and
efficient. This also applies to all our timberbased business streams. These engineered wood products require us to be innovative, efficient and competitive.
Q: What are you doing with your power operations?
A: We are providing hydro-power to the community as well as using it for our own purposes. We supply the Bulolo community, the PNG grid and our operations. The question has been asked ‘will we ultimately become a power company as well as a forestry company?’ We have become this already. We will continue to grow our major business streams.
Q: What are your biggest challenges and opportunities?
A: Improved infrastructure is critical to our continued success, as are favourable exchange rates with exports and less bureaucratic red tape. Financially stable government provides stable income for our power business streams; essentially this applies to the local economy as well.
Q: You seem to be expanding quite quickly. How does that affect your organisation and management? Have you had to do any restructuring?
A: Any large organisation such as ours frequently tweaks its management and in recent times we have undergone a major restructure that has been successful and beneficial. This was not brought about by expansion, but rather by a weakening economy, which we experienced two years or so ago. While we have expanded in certain business streams, the main focus has been on greater efficiencies and output, plus producing higher value products.
Q: How are you expanding your operations and product range?
A: We are producing and exporting some really innovative and interesting products that represent value-adding to an otherwise basic piece of plywood. Products such as modular bridges and decking into Australia and New Zealand; specialised railway bridge re-decking in Sydney; sound barriers along Australian highways; and scarf-jointed bus floors for Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Hong Kong. We’ve also continued to develop our hydro-power operations. We operate three stations, including the oldest and newest hydro power stations in PNG. We are the only independent power producer that supplies hydro-power to PNG Power. We are also currently well advanced with the development of our fourth, and fifth, hydropower stations.