“Quicklook” Assessment of Greater Adelaide's Assets & Challenges ...

• Anchoring for business operation in the Asia Pacific Region
• Great return per employee
• Great Industry clusters that are forming
• Generally have to work harder to sell the business but makes for very sharp
people
• Study of the price premium difference from Australia versus Asia Pacific and
came out to 5% which is not worth the hassle and the perceived incompetence
that inconvenience from bad incident
CASE STUDY PRESENTATIONS
INVEST SA
Paul Wizniak is responsible for identifying and attracting foreign investment to SA, and
prior to this, had looked at reinvestment as well as local investment. Now, his section is
only responsible for foreign direct investment; and has twenty-two people. The specific
focus is on ICT, other teams look at food, administration, etc. They take a marketing
approach and do research working collectively with other agencies locally; review and
control their own destiny, by reviewing their own sector. They are mandated to work on
a state-wide basis for investment opportunities that are good for the region as a whole.
Perhaps there is more skill in the city than in the regions, so there is a need to
encourage high level IT skills in regions. At this time the real opportunity issues are for
investment opportunities within Adelaide and the high IT sector. A remote office is in
London called Invest Australia. It is hoped to open a office in new west to establish
relationships with them. To get into the door of technical recognition the World
Congress IT Global Congress is being hosted by the Department of Industry and Trade.
It is also being used to elevate the branding of Adelaide.
The businesses and government have been very active with partnering with various
agencies like Austrade (Austrade provides advice to companies on which overseas
markets hold the highest sales potential for their product, how they can build a presence
in these markets, and what sort of practical and financial help is available ii ). The local
government is looking to build more joint private partnerships. Sometimes these can
have some ramifications like when EDS was awarded governmental contracts as CDC
and IBM were unhappy. However, there is a need to sustain/maintain competitive
markets in different industry sectors to market as attraction for other companies to come.
Austin is a good place to develop new products before the US gets to see it, could be a
capitalization point and makes good test bed environment for companies. Adelaide is
also an excellent candidate as a test market. It has already been used by SMART
CARD and KFC as a test bed. Medical optics SA one of has one of the largest markets
particularly in contact lenses. There are 800 companies with direct workforce, and forty
percent of the population has diploma or higher. The Adelaide area is a gateway to
Asia.
SA Wish list
• Need people with Business sense and product to market expertise –
commercialization of technologies.
FUSION (www.fusion.com.au)
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