By Dr Wilfred Isak April
This week I am writing to you from the city of Fortaleza, Brazil that is hosting the second edition of the Brazil-African forum. The 2014 forum is titled “Infrastructure, partnership and development”. This event is held every two years to foster closer business relations between Brazil and Africa. Closer business relations for Namibia with Brazil can also mean having direct flights between Namibia and Brazil that can bring the nations closer.
Over thirty African nations are represented at this year’s forum. I am fortunate enough to attend this years’ forum as a moderator for the session on “South Atlantic Inter-connection through Undersea Cable”. Taking part in this historic event, gave me the perfect topic for today’s discussion: “Exporting”. Namibians exporting products or services has never been an easy task as there are approximately 7 billion potential customers in the world. With the advancement of technology at least 2.4 billion of these customers are online.
Given these business opportunities such as partnerships with Brazil, it becomes important that we manufacture our products locally in Namibia and export the final products.
Let us consider a few pointers that can be beneficial to your business.
First, assess your business whether or not your business is ready. Some people can be very arrogant with no support or infrastructure and end up failing. You will lose money if you do not have local infrastructure and support to handle exporting. Another critical point to consider is that you might end up losing market share if your enterprise is too stretched to handle both markets.
When you are assessing your company, it is very important that you first determine whether or not your product is successful in the local market. If your product is not even succeeding at home with a customer base of only slightly over 2 million people, it wont succeed in the international market. I am not implying that our market is too small or we are uneducated. No, we are a global player and a product that does not make its mark at home will not succeed abroad.
A second critical factor to consider is to be ready to change the product. It is very important that you look at the time and resources it will take for your business to start exporting. Never underestimate the time it can take to change a product to fit the international market. If you own a Namibian company that wishes to export soap to Brazil, check if the Brazilians prefer smaller bars of soap. If the bars, which your company produced, are too big, it won’t work. It could costs you a fortune changing the sizes of the bar soap, before the product can eventually start selling.
Plan your strategy: Do not take a scattered approach and plan from the start. When you want to move your product to an international market it is worthwhile to use the Internet extensively. Websites of big players in the market will be useful to find suppliers. Issues of tariffs and licensing should not be taken lightly. Do extensive research with people who are familiar with the country that you wish to export to or sometimes import from.
In addition when you are looking at exporting, you will need a number of partners to ensure that your business is successful. It is worthwhile building good relationships with suppliers and distributors. Imagine a great freight forwarding company that helps you with paperwork, customs duties and a range of other information that you might not even have considered.
Be passionate about your product, passion is a must in business as it shows you love what you sell. No matter how good the product or how high the demands; it won’t sell if you don’t love it. When you choose to export your product to another country be fair. If you overprice the product people will not buy. You must develop the ability to look at your clients in the eye and know that they get value. Namibians have in a short period of 24 years learnt what things are worth, wherever it is on sale in the world. I believe that exporting is a worthwhile strategy for Namibian businesses. Next week we will explore deeper into business opportunities between Brazil and Africa and lessons I learnt from the forum.
*Dr Wilfred Isak April is a UNAM Graduate. He holds a PhD (Entrepreneurship) from New Zealand. Currently he lectures Entrepreneurship & Management at the University of Namibia.