Fletcher off to Japan

Press, 23 October 1980, Page 19

Fletcher off to Japan

PA Wellington Fletcher Holdings, Ltd, plans to become the first New Zealand company to take its own trade delegation to Japan. The company’s development manager in charge of overseas trade, Mr R. McCorquodale, announced this during an address to the Rotary Club of New Plymouth on motivating for - exports. The 14-man delegation, , which will leave in the next few months, will be away for 8 days and would be led by the Fletcher group’s chairman. Sir James Fletcher. It would also include group managing director. Mr H. A. Fletcher, as well as eight other key managing directors of Fletcher operating companies and senior support executives, he said. The company was undertaking it to cement existing Japanese business relationships and seek new areas for future trade.

Fletcher had been dealing closely with major Japanese corporations such as Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Nichimen for up to twenty years. There was no substitute for long-established relationships such as those which Fletcher had developed, particularly when they are based on two-way trading which benefited both companies and both countries, Mr McCorquodale said, The delegation reflected the high priority Fletcher placed on increasing its own trade with Japan which was already running at several million dollars annually, “For example, the total output of our Kopu sawmill, near Thames, is fully committed to supplying the Japanese market with more than S2OM of finished sizes of .timber in the next five years. "Earlier this year Fletcher.

i signed a contract to supply our Bison board, a thin particle board, to Japan, The contract began earlier this month, and involves the export of S9M of particle board to Japan in the next three years. “And all the production from our lucerne processing plant just outside Ashburton is annually exported to Japan for use in stock feed,” he said. Mr McCorquodale, who developed the concept of Fletcher taking its own trade delegations overseas as well as participating in other official New Zealand trade missions, said the two missions already taken to the Pacific and South-East Asia this year, had proved successful in terms of contacts and sales made.