ASEAN NOW - Blackmores

Transcript

Peter Osborne, Managing Director Asia for Blackmores.

Blackmores is a listed company on the Australian Stock Exchange and we make a range of vitamins and dietary supplements to help with people’s nutritional needs and overall health and wellbeing of our consumers.

So we’re in a number of markets in ASEAN. So we continue to try to expand to essentially cover all the markets in ASEAN and we’ll continue to grow that business over the next couple of years.

At Blackmores we export around seventy million Australian dollars worth of our Australian made vitamins and dietary supplements into ASEAN.

One of the keys for our successes for Blackmores in ASEAN has been designing products that specifically meet the needs of consumers in those countries because every market in ASEAN is different and the consumer have different nutritional needs.

Blackmores has been a big supporter of free trade agreements between Australia and the various markets in ASEAN as well as the Australia-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement.

We have a strong policy of only employing local staff. So we have 750 staff in Asia now.

I think one of the secrets of our success has been very strong, locally empowered teams.

I think for any company that’s doing business overseas, it’s about diversifying risk. So for us, doing business in ASEAN has really diversified our risk away from being very much an Australian focused company to now having a broad number of markets. So if one market’s up, one market’s down, you can really spread your risk and overall your revenues and your profits continue to grow the more you expand.

Okay, that increases the business complexity but I think the other thing for us is that you get a lot of learnings out doing business in those markets that you transfer market to market or you can transfer from ASEAN back into Australia.

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