NZ firms need a better understanding of Asian markets
NEW ZEALAND companies can struggle to build business relationships that work in Asia, says veteran director and former CEO Rodney Wong.
‘‘The businesses that are going into Asia or China are 20 years behind where they need to be in terms of diversity of view and understanding how to do business on a cultural and relationship level,’’ he said.
Simply learning things like the right way to hand over your business card doesn’t cut it, Wong said.
‘‘In a values-based relationship, both parties understand how they’re going to make something out of a deal. While that can be cash or kind, if it’s kind then they have to understand at some stage that favour will be called upon.’’
Wong is first generation New Zealand-Chinese, a director of venison meat co-products producer Lowe Meats and a global training leader for Rotary International. He said while Kiwi companies have to build trust, they also need to work out how not to get ripped off in China.
‘‘In a loose sense they think if you get ripped off it’s because you’re bad at doing business and it’s your own fault.’’
Wong said that the biggest misconception Kiwis have is that all Asians are the same and that Asia is one homogenous monocultural region.
‘‘When they get there, they suddenly realise it is not.
‘‘You can’t bite off and eat China, you have to nibble and find the right individuals and organisations to share the table with,’’ he said.
Wong’s father was one of the estimated 4500 Chinese immigrants who paid a poll tax, imposed from the late 19th century after a wave of antiChinese sentiment in the US and Australia. It was lifted in the 1930s when Japan invaded China and finally repealed in 1944.
In 2002, then Prime Minister Helen Clark apologised to the New Zealand Chinese community.
Wong is the middle of five children, raised on a familyowned market garden in Mangere, south Auckland.
The only language his grandparents and mother spoke was Cantonese.
His early ambition was to be an international troubleshooter. He didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded better than working the soil.
When he went to Auckland Grammar in the 1970s he was one of only 12 Chinese in the school. ‘‘Now you’d have that many in every class,’’ he said.
After graduating from Otago University with a science degree in biochemistry and human physiology, Wong went to work at a Waikato dairy factory.
By 1992 he was heading Pacific Brands Food Group/National Foods and producing brands such as Yoplait, Birdseye, Leggos and Edgell. Wong joined a management buyout with three investors in 1994.
‘‘We were producing one million bottles of yoghurt a week from Palmerston North and half of that was going to Australia.’’
In 2004, two years after retiring, he became managing director at Noske Kaeser, a Manawatu airconditioning systems manufacturer, until he left last year.
Wong’s governance career includes helping merge two Crown Research Institutes into one – Plant & Food.
He is also an angel investor and mentor to public good projects, arranging for Rotary to sponsor the parents of murdered German tourist Birgit Brauer to New Zealand and personally travelling with the couple.
‘‘This is the sort of stuff I value, even more than the corporate business.
‘‘There’s no point doing something unless it is significant.’’