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Georgia has added a trade office in Peru, expanding the number of countries where the state has a physical presence to 12.
Announced March 20, along with International Day at the Capitol and the Go Global reception celebrating exporters, the new Peru office is operated by the same company that has been awarded a new contract to represent the state in neighboring Chile.
Brian Wilson, the state’s former rep in Chile, retired this year.
Santiago-based BusinessHub is a consultancy making use of its founder’s two decades of experience helping governments and associations connect with the Chilean market. But the company recently began to beyond that country of 17 million people.
“Chile used to be enough for foreign clients,” said Veronica Medina, Georgia’s new managing director for Chile and Peru, in an interview with Global Atlanta. “Chile is not enough anymore.”
As serendipity would have it, the company expanded into Peru in 2016, just before the state planned to broaden its Latin American presence.
“We were looking to increase our brand presence in the Latin American region,” said Mary Waters, deputy commissioner for trade the Georgia Department of Economic Development. (BusinessHub also serves other South American countries like Argentina, but Georgia doesn’t count among Georgia’s offices because the company has no physical presence there.)
Eduardo Garcia-Zapatero, who was brought on by Ms. Medina to handle the Peruvian market in 2016, sent an email to Ms. Waters’ division after hearing about the state’s offices in Chile and Colombia. A week later, Georgia put out the request for proposals eventually won by BusinessHub.
“It all comes together,” Mr. Garcia-Zapatero said.
Georgia now has offices in all of the countries of the Pacific Alliance, a Latin American bloc pushing for increased trade with the world: Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile.
Peru’s Promise and Peril
Georgia’s addition of Peru comes at a time of both promise and uncertainty for the country. While it’s experiencing an solid run of economic growth, eclipsing 3 percent last year and projected to hit nearly 4 percent in 2018, it’s also facing a potential political crisis.
President Pedro Pablo Kuczynksi stepped down Wednesday ahead of a planned impeachment vote Thursday. According to news reports, he is alleged to have improperly accepted payments a decade ago from Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction firm that has admitted to paying out nearly $800 million in bribes for public works contracts, mostly around Latin America. The president denies wrongdoing.
Peru’s consul general in Atlanta, Miguel Aleman, downplayed the idea that a transition of power would affect Peru’s stable economy, though rating agency Moody’s cautioned that the full impacts won’t be known until markets react. Vice President Martin Vizcarra is expected to replace Mr. Kuczynski.
Regardless of politics, Mr. Garcia-Zapatero he is seeing more interest from foreign investors in the wake of reforms that have progressively opened the Peruvian economy to the outside world over the last decade.
At the same time, Peruvians are looking more to the United States for quality products and services. A U.S.-Peru free-trade agreement enacted in 2009 has helped make the U.S. one of its top trading partners along with China.
Georgia has been a destination for Peruvian agricultural products like asparagus (by air) and tangelos (by sea). The country is also an exporter of textiles has a strong mining sector.
Mr. Garcia-Zapatero pointed to opportunities in the water technology sector and said Georgia companies should take advantage of a nearly $8 billion plan to reconstruct coastal infrastructure affected by 2017 floods.
Timing Is Everything
Mr. Aleman, the Atlanta-based consul general, said Georgia’s move comes at an opportune moment and would result in a “win-win” for the state’s trade ties with Peru.
“The announcement of the opening of Georgia trade representation in Lima is a great opportunity for the further advancement of the trade and in general the economic relationship between Peru and Georgia. It is an important recognition to the economic growth of Peru and the favorable environment Peru has for trade, investment and for doing business,” Mr. Aleman said in a statement to Global Atlanta.
Meeting with companies at the state’s Go Global reception celebrating the state’s trade figures and international representatives Tuesday, Ms. Medina said she was impressed by their export readiness and eagerness to tap new markets.
But even those new to trade could find both Peru and Chile attractive, she said. Companies with high-tech, niche products or even services like environmental consulting or information technology benefit from both countries’ experience with the outside world.
Success stories with Atlanta connections include Sovos, a Boston-based cloud invoicing and compliance platform that bought a Chilean company in recent months, as well as First Performance Global, a fintech company that landed a partnership with the nation’s largest payment processor.
“The ground is there for business to be done,” said Ms. Medina, who added that services will be part of her portfolio, not just goods.
Georgia is running a trade mission to Colombia, Peru and Chile in April.
Invest Atlanta is set to soon take a trade mission to Chile to learn more about Startup Chile and other innovation initiatives in a country that has created a worldwide model for how governments can spur growth in technology and entrepreneurship.
For companies, these kinds of collaborations are key to competitiveness, Ms. Medina said.
“Nowadays in order for a company to survive, you have to be international.”
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