Clive Drinkwater is the regional director for UK Trade and Investment in the North West Region, responsible for helping North West businesses achieve success in overseas markets. Clive has taken up this role following extensive private sector experience in international trade, working in industry and selling to over 90 countries worldwide. Clive has particular experience in Asia, having gained first hand experience of the area during spells living and working in Indonesia, Malaysia and China
So, you’ve got a fantastic product or service offer and a terrific support network. You run a tight ship, have high productivity and should be internationally competitive, but If nobody knows about you, you will never sell. The answer is, …
In my exporting challenge blog I set a series of questions. I now turn to the question of routes to market. Luckily Doug Mahoney, UKTI’s Director-West Midlands, recently blogged on the subject and promised more in the future but I …
Any body reading my blogs will know that I enjoy food, all sorts of different food, so it was in search of a good schweinshaxe while attending the Frankfurt fair as a young exporter when I endured one of my …
If you’re accepting our challenge to get started exporting in 2012, a few quiet days over the Christmas break can be well spent in thinking about how you will decide on how to select your target markets. I see from …
In my earlier Exporting Challenge blog I invited you to come along to our event on 12 December in the Concorde Suite at Manchester Airport to learn about how you could join in. I’m delighted to report back that we …
When I posed various questions in my blog on the export challenge recently, leading to my answering the question this week: "Are there any regulatory requirements you need to be aware of?" little did I expect an excited phone call on …
In my blog "Exporting Challenge" I outlined some factors you would have to address before you embark on your exporting journey. The first of these was "Will you need to adapt your product offer to suit overseas markets?" One of …
It’s an undisputed fact that we need to have more firms exporting from the UK for the economy to grow. Our Minister, Lord Green, was in London last week with the Prime Minister to launch a national challenge to find …
When I leave our new office at Daresbury Laboratory, if the traffic on the M56 is snarled up, I occasionally take a short cut through Daresbury village going past All Saints Church. Famously the curate of this church in 1832 …
So you’ve decided it’s a good idea to have a look at exporting but need a bit of context to understand why it’s potentially beneficial to your firm? Up and down the country SMEs are asking themselves the same questions. …
