Transcript: Nicola Watkinson on Sky Business News
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29 November 2012
>>SKY News Speaker 1: Austrade Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner for West Europe, Nicola Watkinson, joins us now from our Melbourne studios. Nicola, look thanks very much for your time. Look, are there opportunities out there ‘cause it’s all doom and gloom, you know, in terms of the headlines but is there opportunity for Australian businesses?
>>Nicola Waktinson: Look I think there certainly are. I mean there’s no doubt that the economic situation in Europe is in difficulties. All the macroeconomic figures speak for themselves but working on the ground in Europe with Australian businesses and with European companies you do get a lot more of a nuanced feel for what the opportunities are. We work out of the hub in Frankfurt in Germany and I was at a dinner there just the other night and we have one Australian company that’s using the leverage of the high Aussie dollar to expand their operations close to their customers in Germany at the moment and on the other side of me, I was talking to a German supplier who was saying the order books are still quite full. So I think it is a little bit of horses for courses and there certainly are good business prospects in certain economies and in certain market segments.
>>SKY News Speaker 2: Although given the very different growth outlooks between Europe and what we see here in Australia, do you get any sense that the interest in investing in Australia is kind of outweighing the interest going the other way, from Australia over to Europe?
>>Nicola Watkinson: Well I think, you know, you’re certainly right, there is a strong interest in investing productively into Australia at the moment. So if you take Spain as an example, obviously the domestic economy is very flat there, so the big Spanish companies are looking for their growth internationally and the economic resilience of Australia, its reputation for innovation and its links to the high growth Asian markets is certainly very attractive, and indeed we’ve seen a number of the major infrastructure players come into the Australian market in the last little while. But back the other way, we’ve also seen a large increase in the investment from Australia into Europe, particularly in the services sector. So we’ve seen companies such as Computershare and Sonic Health, CSL and Toga Hospitality, Resmed and others, all expanding their presence in Europe over the last year or so, which is very encouraging to see as well.
>>SKY News Speaker 1: And is it something you expect to be there for the long term? ‘Cause there’s an awful lot of talk about the need to expand and exposure for Asia to the point where some of the maturer economies and markets are somewhat put to the side and almost seen as old news.
>>Nicola Watkinson: Well I mean I think that’s right, and certainly there’s no doubt that there are enormous opportunities for Australian business in the Asian region but that doesn’t exclude the opportunities that exist in Europe as well and it’d be quite interesting to note that – a little counterintuitively perhaps – but merchandise, good exports to Europe actually increased out of Australia last year by about 11% and certainly if you’ve got an innovative technology or certainly in the services area, an interesting solution, then the European market does still have a strong appetite for those kind of Australian products and services.
>>SKY News Speaker 2: Give us some examples of those.
>>Nicola Watkinson: Well just one example would be something like the Toga Hospitality which have the serviced apartment hotels. It’s a new sort of business model that’s been coming into the European market and this Australian company has opened up a number of these sort of serviced apartment hotels across Germany and into Denmark and is looking for further growth now. So that would be one example. And of course we have other examples such as Computershare, Resmed, Cochlear and so on, in the medical devices and diagnostic services area which are also seeing strong growth right across Europe – in Italy, in France, in Spain and also into Germany and up north into Sweden.
>>SKY News Speaker 1: Is the key sort of going into these markets with something new, not just sort of offering something that’s already there but maybe being doing a little bit better, having a bit of innovation to help open doors?
>>Nicola Watkinson: I think innovation is certainly the key and it’s something that in Austrade we’ve been working to encourage the companies to look at, both in terms of what the Australian companies can bring to the European market, but also what we’re looking to attract back out of Europe to the Australian economy. So Europe also has a lot of innovation and technologies and services that it can bring into Australia to complement the existing business capabilities we have here and that has been part of our investment attraction work over the last couple of years. So I think it’s a very good area of complementarity between Australia and Europe and is something that we should be building on over the coming years as a long term sustainable business plan for growing the two way trade and investment.
>>SKY News Speaker 2: Thank you so much for joining us to talk with us about this, Nicola Watkinson, we appreciate that very much. Austrade Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner for West Europe.
>>Nicola Watkinson: Thank you very much.
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