BIOZONE International Ltd

A teacher’s decision to unleash his entrepreneurial side 20 years ago resulted in BIOZONE International, today a highly successful niche publisher, selling exciting and effective high school biology resources all over the globe.

Richard Allan started his career as a secondary school biology teacher but frustration with the quality of resources available for his students promoted him to develop some of his own. Other teachers started requesting copies and he decided to move into publishing full time, setting up BIOZONE initially from his Hamilton home.

By the mid-1990s the small firm had won an 80 percent share of the New Zealand high school market and Mr Allan had to decide whether to broach into other subject areas or stick with biology and start exporting. He decided to stay with what he knew best and by keeping the focus on one subject area and doing it extremely well has been able to compete with much larger players. 

Australia was BIOZONE’s first export market, and after some initial amusement that a Kiwi company thought it could tell them how to teach biology, business “took off like a rocket”. Today BIOZONE is among the top three publishers of biology resources in Australia.
 
In 1999 it set up an office in the UK, and while it’s found that market more challenging given its conservative nature and the great number of competing publishing companies with big budgets, business has grown steadily and the UK is now the hub for expansion into wider Europe.

Today BIOZONE'S suite of products includes workbooks covering senior biology courses, modular workbooks on selected topics, and CD Roms. Students across the world from South Africa to Canada, Australia to Germany are using its resources, with significant deals for India and Russia in the pipeline. The export expansion has been done on a shoestring budget, explains Mr Allan, by cleverly exploiting teachers’ networks.

“We know we have a great product lineup and we exploit every opportunity to get our product out in front of the teacher practitioners - once they see our material it becomes a ‘must have’ and that message is spread very effectively through their networking. We literally have hundreds of unpaid sales reps out there pushing our material to the uninitiated. That is powerful marketing.”

Among the most exciting developments in the past few years has been entry into North America, where a lot of groundwork is now starting to pay dividends, particularly in the United States, which has 32,000 high schools.

“Teacher reaction to BIOZONE products in the US has been highly enthusiastic,” says Mr Allan. “Our products are seen as refreshingly different from the standard publishers’ offerings that tend to be all written to the same formula.”

Mr Allan’s also excited about China. Earlier this year the firm signed a cooperation agreement with the People’s Education Press, China’s largest education publisher, which will see an initial run of 100,000 BIOZONE workbooks adapted for the market and translated into Chinese.

“With around five million Chinese students studying biology at senior secondary school level at any one time, the deal opens up a huge potential market for us.”

The China deal came about after BIOZONE attended a book fair in that country as part of an New Zealand Trade and Enterprise contingent. Mr Allan says going with a group gave him the confidence to approach this big market.

BIOZONE has about ten staff in its Hamilton, Australia and UK offices. In New Zealand, content developers include writers (qualified science teachers) and graphics specialists, who produce the material using state of the art publishing equipment.

The books have a very strong visual emphasis, with lots of graphics and annotated diagrams, and Mr Allan says today’s students overstimulated by X-boxes, DVDs and other technology are almost tricked into reading them. New editions are published annually to ensure the material is at the cutting edge of biological research and thinking.

“We also put a huge amount of effort into researching each export market and understanding the particular requirements and nuances of that market, and adapt our resources accordingly.”

BIOZONE goes the extra mile to keep clients happy - in the United States books are delivered within two to three days, often faster than local publishers, emails and phone calls are all returned in person within 24 hours.

As well as selling directly into markets like Australia and the UK, BIOZONE is selling the foreign rights to publishers in countries such as Poland and China, enabling it to grow without having to significantly boost its New Zealand capability or translate its material.

The international growth possibilities seem endless for this successful Hamilton publisher, and while Mr Allan says he sometimes feels like he’s got a tiger by the tail, the future is very exciting and he thinks more Kiwi companies should “get out there and export”.

“There are just so many potential opportunities if you have the passion and the courage to go after them.”

Contact: Richard Allan, Managing Director, BIOZONE, phone 07 856 8104, email Richard@biozone.co.nz, www.biozone.co.nz