Asia Business Investor Blog

The website itself provides quite limited information on specific investment and business opportunities. and it is clear that to take full advantage of the services an appointment most probably be necessary. Some of the more developed trade sourcing websites of which there are many, clearly provide a easier approach for specific trade leads. For investment, our own AsiaBusinessInvestor.com actually has a more accessible list of investment opportunities that the Austrade one. Nevertheless, Austrade is providing a consultative service which is quite valuable to specific exporters or investors. 

Whilst a personal service is great, one thing often remarked is that it is actually difficult for small and medium-sized businesses to obtain specific time with an Austrade representative. Not unsurprisingly, government agencies like Austrade are faced with quite a workload of small, medium and large businesses all looking at appointments with individual consultants. As with almost all the various government trade and investment agencies with limited resources, most just focus on big business and often never respond to small business. They want to facilitate trade deals in the hundreds of millions and billions. When is comes to small and medium sized business, there is less available in terms of support and it requires simply more effort and legwork on behalf of those businesses themselves. 

Many of the Austrade events listed on their website are very useful in providing an opportunity to connect with each other and these are structured around major business events for particular industries. We would always recommend such events and if you are looking at potentially attending some of these events then a good resource is ConferenceBay.com. This website allows you you can pick-up significant discounts (as much as 50%) for many Austrade recommended industry events. Worth keeping in mind if you are on a budget.

Austrade also have a business program called Business Club Australia which is a free membership-based business matching program that can help create international business opportunities against the backdrop of major sporting events. Using sporting events such as the Commonwealth Games, FINA World Swimming Championships and Rugby World Cup business events have been used for networking. In many respects, Australian's love of sport is a key way to connect companies doing business in Asia. The next Business Club Australia meet is the Beijing Olympics and details are available here. No doubt if you have the time and are planning to go to Beijing, it looks worthwhile. It is a pity that these events are so infrequent.

For most small and medium-sized businesses and investors, perhaps the best thing to remember about Austrade is that whilst the services can be beneficial it has limited resources. Consider working with small business consultants, go to industry events and make the maximum use of the internet as these are going to provide greater return on investment than relying on any government agency to facilitate business.