There has been a lot made of the plight of New Zealand's biggest exporter - Fonterra, and the farmers whose incomes have been plummeting more quickly than the popularity of certain MP's.Exporting has always been a tough game, particularly if your 500gms of butter or cheese is pretty similar to everybody else's.
We suffer from the "tyranny of distance", being a long way from our nearest neighbour, and a very, very long way from Europe - so exporters from NZ have had to overcome the time, distance and cost that other competitors closer to the action may not have to consider.Whilst many Kiwi exporters have succumbed and faltered over the years, some closing their doors, others moving manufacturing overseas, at least one has not. One of the companies in our group, Bio-Bottle Ltd has exported since the early 1990's. Bio-Bottle is a major global supplier of infectious Substances packaging to laboratories, hospitals, universities and Health Authorities, and has distributors in Australia, UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Singapore, Japan, Korea, and more recently, Saudi Arabia A business that evolved from opportunity, Bio-Bottle was an early entrant into what soon became quite a crowded and competitive market. We saw that the only Infectious Substance packaging available (and it was a magnificent piece of engineering) cost US$300 - quite simply - the market was forced by expense to "ignore" the rules. We (and others) developed a range that sold for less than $10 per unit, and away we went. Being innovative, Bio-Bottle developed a colour coded system that was quickly copied and embraced by most of our competitors. In addition, we developed a range of packaging specifically related to temperature control that remains unique to this day. It has been a very tough road, especially when the exchange rate was against us as the NZ$ strengthened - often meaning every item we sold actually cost us money, but playing the long game, we remained ever hopeful that the market would change. The temptation was to follow so many others and move our manufacturing offshore - whilst we'd have been better off financially, I made the decision to stand firm - we are first and foremost a Kiwi company - we employ Kiwi's and we're proud Kiwi's. www.bio-bottle.com Comments are closed.
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Don MalcolmA perfect day involves being on my Harley with a long ride ahead.
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