Trade tour to US about opportunities, business leaders say
AUCKLAND: A mix of tech entrepreneurs and leaders of more established businesses are joining Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on her trip to the United States — the prime minister’s first US tour since the pandemic began two years ago.
The tour is aimed at drumming up new export business and encouraging the return of tourists to New Zealand.
The party landed in New York yesterday morning (NZ time) and will make their way across the US to San Francisco.
Will it amount to more than showpony photoops? One of those picked for the trip, Straker Translations founder Grant Straker, said his experience on similar tours in the past proved they were worth their salt.
Some of the agenda is still under wraps.
However, it has been confirmed that, among others, the group will meet executives from Amazon and Microsoft — which
both have action in the other trade direction as they spend collective billions on new data centres in northwest Auckland.
More curiously, a meeting with Twitter executives is scheduled.
In September 2019, Ms Ardern met then Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey at the Beehive for a postChristchurch Call powwow.
But in November last year, Mr Dorsey quit. His replacement, Parag Agrawal, had spent just months in the role before Elon Musk made his takeover offer.
Things turned fraught for the new Twitter chief executive last week when Mr Musk complained about fake accounts on the social media platform.
Mr Agrawal tweeted a nuanced thread about steps taken to deal with the issue. Mr Musk replied with a poo emoji.
Shortly after, Mr Musk announced he would step in as interim chief executive if the deal went ahead.
That will be an interesting situation for the New Zealand group to step into when when it meets Twitter executives at the firm’s San Francisco head office.
Certainly, events have conspired to make that leg of the trip a complete waste of time.
But Mr Straker said such trips were very worthwhile overall.
‘‘When I did a Maori tech mission to the US in 2018, I was introduced to Ubco [which had a partner on the US West Coast], and my wife and I invested personally in them as they were doing an early investment round.
‘‘Roll forward to today: they now have 100plus staff, are going incredibly well and also on this mission. They also signed up US investors on that trip, so the networks and opportunities on these trade missions can be very valuable,’’ he said.
Such trips were an opportunity to build networks at a senior level, and his company would showcase what it was doing for the likes of IBM to ‘‘other leading companies and investors’’.
‘‘The PM has certainly opened some doors for us on this, and has been very engaged around using any brand power she has to get us in front of people we would like to meet,’’ he said.
‘‘The trick is having a team in the US to act on any opportunities so I have some of my senior leadership from Europe and the US meeting up with me in New
York. The mission is good timing for that as I haven’t seen some of them for more than two years in person.’’
From a tech industry perspective, ‘‘the tech companies on the tour will be focused on showcasing New Zealand as a somewhere you can build great tech businesses because we think differently — as we have to, due to our isolation and distance from key markets — and how that builds long term value’’.
For Parkable — an Auckland startup whose system can be used to ‘‘hotdesk’’ shared car park spaces, ‘‘Airbnb’’ empty ones and manage EV chargers — the trip was a chance to expand its US business.
Chief executive Toby Littin said his firm had just signed a deal with the City of Los Angeles, which would use Parkable’s software to manage a pilot programme under which car park spaces would be reserved for people who carpooled.
Mr Littin said the prime minister’s trade mission was good timing: the Los Angeles deal had sprung from the city’s desire to find sustainable ways of managing the returntowork surge, and similar tenders were opening up around the US as organisations looked for ways to wrangle hybrid workforces and meet new sustainability targets. —