Thursday 16 June 2011

The Brazilian Connection

This week, we have been snowed-under with the preparation and hosting of a small trade mission from Brazil and were still taking care of them at 7pm Thursday night when the giant wheels of the newsletter presses usually start to turn.

The delegation is from an organisation called FIESC  http://www.fiescnet.com.br/ which is a single hybrid business support organisation for Santa Catarina state which is one of the 26 states which make up the Federative Republic of Brazil.

As Brazil is the B of BRICS, it's been interesting to spend 3 days hosting the delegation, showing them how the UK's IT and consultancy sectors work and drawing comparisons with Brazil.

With over 6 million inhabitants, Santa Catarina is about the same population as the West Midlands so we can try to compare it economically to a typical UK RDA region.

FIESC is a combination of BIS, Chamber of Commerce, Business Link, UKTI, e-Skills and Technology Strategy Board with departments covering each industry sector and employing 2,000 staff to do this for an RDA-sized economy.

Then there is also the federal (national) layer which overlays these functions.

Is it my  imagination or are they really very well provided with business support in Santa Catarina?

In the many meetings we had over the 3 days, one common theme that came out was that the EU is much more internally diverse in its  business cultures than an outsider might think and that a number of uniform, deeply-held but always unattributable perceptions or prejudices were in place regarding which countries are good or bad to work with, reliable or unreliable business partners, honest or less honest counterparts.

Anyone care to guess which EU countries were the saints and which the sinners?

Have any of you got contacts or interests in Santa Caterina state or elsewhere in Brazil ?  Or are interested in getting involved in a possible future project involving 2-way exchange of expertise, products and services between Brazil and the EU?

If so, get in touch using the usual methods and depending on response, we would look at setting  up a 'UK-BRICS opportunities' group.