Before withdrawal for last week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Vladivostok, Dow Chemical Company executive Pat Dawson had to check a map.
To his surprise, he detected that Vladivostok was northeast of Hong Kong, where he is formed as the company’s Asia-Pacific president, rather than to the northwest as he had assumed. His geographical charge runs out at the Russian border.
Despite the efforts of the Kremlin to promote the country’s Far East as an economic heart forward of the flagship APEC gathering, the territory is still extrinsic for many general companies.
About $10.6 billion of Dow’s $55 billion of global sales came from the Asia-Pacific region, that excludes Russia. The company’s operations in Russia are strong around Moscow, and local sales in 2011 were $770 million. Dow had no approach impasse in the $18.7 billion of infrastructure construction that took place in and around Vladivostok before to the APEC summit.
But Dawson pronounced in an talk in Moscow after returning from Vladivostok that the event had been a successful showcase for Russia’s Far East.
“We should not always be hung adult on maps,” he said. “Going to sleep and waking adult in Vladivostok [made the] existence set in of what’s going on in Russia.”
Appointed Dow’s Asia-Pacific boss in 2010, it was Dawson’s fourth APEC summit, and he slept in one of the bedrooms at the contention site on Russky Island that will now be remade into student dormitories for the new Far Eastern Federal University. He also took partial in a row contention on infrastructure and shared a stage with billionaire Oleg Deripaska and Summa authority Ziyavudin Magomedev.
The event, the setting and the immature volunteers were impressive, he said, though conversations had not been as prolific as the previous year, when the U.S. hosted the annual APEC entertainment in Hawaii.
“I’m not observant it was a big problem … though there could have been a bit some-more open discourse in some of the discussions,” he said. Details were pushed out by the expostulate to show off Vladivostok and the Far East to foreign businessmen and foreign politicians, he added.
Construction related to infrastructure is one of Dow’s large aim markets for its chemical products. While it was not concerned with APEC preparations, it is seeking to leverage the sponsorship of the Olympics to win contracts for building projects outset from the Sochi 2012 Winter Olympics.
Close team-work with the government is essential for success in the infrastructure business, Dawson said.
“As governments set their inhabitant priorities, it helps us to have some-more certainty in where we should make the investments.”