Geographic information systems provider NGIS is hoping its experience in Asia will help it break into China, one of the world’s biggest and fastest-growing markets.
Geographic information systems provider NGIS is hoping its experience in Asia will help it break into China, one of the world’s biggest and fastest-growing markets.
The award-winning business, founded in Perth 10 years ago, officially opened its China business last month, in Hong Kong.
Although NGIS has maintained a presence in Hong Kong for a number of years, its newly formed China-focused business plans to springboard from there into mainland China before the end of 2005.
NGIS director and 2002 WA Business News 40under40 award winner Paul Farrell said China’s rapid economic expansion presented opportunities for NGIS to assist in planning infrastructure and asset management.
“Over the last three years China’s rapidly growing economy has accounted for more than one third of global economic growth, resulting in a 40 per cent increase in imports to the country,” he said.
NGIS develops interactive, online mapping systems (GIS) that are applicable in many different sectors, from mineral and petroleum exploration to engineering and environmental management.
NGIS has successfully grown its operations around Australia and into Asia.
Since entering Asia in the mid 1990s its annual turnover is understood to have increased four-fold, from less than $1 million, while staff numbers in Asia have grown from 11 to 35.
Mr Farrell, who was initially responsible for heading up NGIS’s Asian operation, said the successful growth in Asia had given NGIS the confidence to expand into China.
“Conducting business in Asia is vastly different to that of Australia,” he said.
“We started operations in Asia knowing it would take time to build our business and to do this we needed to focus on building relationships with our Asian clients – on creating successful business partnerships.”
Although the past seven years in Asia have presented a number of opportunities and challenges, Mr Farrell said they had also been highly successful, with NGIS building an excellent reputation throughout the region on a broad range of projects.
“We are now very well placed to expand into mainland China and other markets,” he told WA Business News.
In Asia NGIS mainly works with aid agencies and government bodies, which use GIS in health improvement programs and infrastructure planning.
NGIS’s Asian operations have won a number of important contracts throughout the region, including the Mekong Hazard and Risk Mapping Project in Cambodia, which was aimed at minimising suffering and damage caused by flooding in the Lower Mekong Basin. It has also recently won a number of significant tenders with the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government.
Chris Hoar, who has worked with NGIS in Asia for the past five years, will head up NGIS China.
