The Brexit drama continues and I am sure those doing business with the UK are making contingency plans as best as they can.  Advice from NZ Officials is to keep an eye on advice on the NZTE, MPI and MFAT websites. 

NZTE Trade Commissioner to the UK, Nick Swallow, is back in NZ to give some briefings on the Brexit situation in February, see details here..

A no deal Brexit seems inconceivable, so let’s hope sanity prevails.

Read on if you want some free research from MBA students (let us know) and we also want to hear if any of you are having 'people movement' problems – see example below.

The WTO is looking to develop an e commerce framework to ensure the ease of digital trade and to ensure that while privacy and security of digital trade is paramount, that Countries don’t create unnecessary barriers to digital trade.  BusinessNZ and ExportNZ  support that aim.  See the statement here

Neville Johnson, Director Enabling Services at New Zealand Government Procurement and Property (NZGPP) says the NZBN is the first major step in the digitisation journey for New Zealand. “There’s this key opportunity that presents itself to us and that’s around more efficient international trade. And it provides an opportunity to have that much more effective, simple, easy trade with different nations - both our major trading partners and those nations that we want to increase our level of trade with.

Your NZBN is a globally recognised number, (it’s called a Global Location Number - GLN) so when you use it, any business across the world can recognise you, and use your core business information when they’re interacting with you.

To view case studies click here
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We have been alerted to a company that has had problems getting their international clients employees into New Zealand to do high value work, because they are getting conflicting advice at the border as to whether the agricultural engineers need a work visa or can come in on business travel.  The NZ company does agricultural machinery product testing for the European company and from time to time the EU company needs to send their own engineers to NZ to see the product in the field.  They used to come to NZ as business travellers, but lately have been told to get work visas.  This is not only costly – but makes it hard to do short notice travel, which is often required. 

We are talking to NZ Immigration and MFAT about getting this fixed, but it would be good to know if there are other examples to add weight to our case to have this fixed at the policy level.  Please e mail me if you have an example of people movement barriers – either coming into NZ or your own people working offshore.  There is an EU FTA negotiation underway – and we may be able to tackle this from that angle as well.

cbeard@businessnz.org.nz

ExportNZ is exploring the potential to work with universities to introduce an exporter-focused MBA research project.  The purpose of the programme would be to ask MBA students to produce a report for an exporting business, to meet the exporters needs (market research, market validation, channel selection etc). 

The aim would be to have limited touch points with the business (ie a few meetings as opposed to committing 5-10 hours a week) in order to reduce the time burden on the business itself, but allow the student to work on a project based on a real business’ needs. They would also have an option to run focus groups etc to gain more insight than desk-based research would provide

Please complete this short survey to register your interest

GS1 New Zealand proudly presents Connect 2019: eCommerce Innovation Summit, Thursday 11 April at the Grand Millennium Auckland.

Connect 2019 will deliver an impressive line up of market leading companies at the forefront of thought leadership in business, and their insights will be the ideas that shape our future. Featuring Google, Foodstuffs, Amazon and the Father of 'The Internet of Things’ Kevin Ashton.

GS1 New Zealand also celebrates its’ 40th anniversary this year, and looks back at how a small technological innovation had mammoth changes to the way the world does business, and looks to the future innovations that is changing the business of tomorrow.

Register for Connect 2019 now!

Conference details
Date:  Thursday 11 April 2019
Venue:  Grand Millennium, Auckland
Time:  7am Registration for 7.30am Start
Agenda:  View the agenda

Your investment
Gala Breakfast and Conference package:
-  GS1 New Zealand Member: $359 + GST
-  GS1 New Zealand Non member: $459 + GST

For more information click here

High-Value Nutrition invites you to Foodomics 2019
Foodomics 2019 is where the country’s researchers and businesses taking premium foods for health and wellbeing to the world gather to collaborate, learn about the latest research and opportunities and network. For more information, click here..

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