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Seeing is believing

By Dave Buys

When Compac Sorting Equipment scored its latest success, a $US15 million deal to develop a sorting and packing line for one of the world’s largest citrus companies, it was a matter of “seeing is believing”.

We clinched the recent deal with Paramount Citrus in California – the biggest contract in our 27-year history – on demonstrated and proven performance. Paramount sent a team of engineers out into the field to study all the alternatives, and after seeing our machinery and technology at work, Compac came out on top.

We really encourage potential customers to visit existing installations; we will even sponsor those trips to see our systems in action. We find that when people take the time, do the analysis and study what solutions are on the market, we come up winners.

Doing the research is a lesson we have learned ourselves in the global marketplace. Our first step into the South American market was in Brazil, but it took us a year to realise it was a mistake.

The idea of being able to manufacture there seemed possible in theory, but complex taxes and bureaucracy made it impractical for us. We have realised that we need to do more analysis, to talk to more people, before making important strategic decisions. We learned you can never do too much investigation.

South America has, in fact, become a great success story for Compac; in the past five years we went from nothing to developing US$10 million of sales there.

The key part of our success has been having people in markets. With assistance from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE), we were able to establish a market presence in Chile and Brazil by putting a person into the market in Chile.

Previously we had an agent in Chile, but it wasn’t until we put our own person on the ground that we were able to get down to business. The previous agent was focused on a whole range of products, not just ours, so by getting a market manager in place we became proactive.