Steve Craven's Page

See what help your company can get to sell in foreign markets! HiSTEP

Before the holidays I posted about the great export development plans that MBA students at Hawaii Pacific University had done for small Hawaii companies during the fall 2011 semester. It’s time to get your company into the program for the spring 2012 semester! More than 50 Hawaii companies have used this program over the past four years and have achieved some magnificent results in penetrating new foreign…

Did you realize that the Jakarta metropolitan area is the world’s 4th largest, sporting more than 22 million people? Or that Indonesia is the world’s 18th largest economy? Indonesia’s economy has also stayed robust during the last few years of economic weakness, and some 60 million people are positioned to enter the ranks of the middle class in the next decade. Yet the country is only the #32 destination for U.S. exports, signaling that there may be room for improvement.

These were…

I’ll never forget my first impression of Hanoi: “This is like Taiwan, but thirty years earlier!” So much has changed since then – and so much has stayed the same. You see, my first visit to Hanoi was in 1995 after President Clinton ended the U.S. trade embargo. I found a Vietnam that had moved on from our war, that revered the quality of American products, and that wanted American investment – but only wanted one of everything. Most of that still holds true.

The Hawaii…