When Rob Black walks each morning into the Adelaide offices of SAMEX, the meat trading company he founded 31 years ago, he’s comfortably aware that something, somewhere, is almost certainly going wrong.
A permanent state of crisis is the price SAMEX and other buccaneering meat traders pay for being the thin end of the wedge into some of Australia's less well-known meat markets.
SAMEX turns over more than $100 million worth of meat between 46 countries—including lesser-known clients of Australian meat like Ghana, Morocco and Mauritus—via 60-odd ports.
Combine this logistics challenge with currency movements, an almost inevitable event when meat can spend six weeks on the water, and you have a business that demands a taste for adventure.
Mr Black, recently nominated an "export hero" by the Australian Institute of Exporters, hasn't lost the taste even as he moves through his sixties.
"I've been hijacked in Iran, shot at in Libya, and had an engine fall off a 747 over the Atlantic," he says.
"It's been an interesting ride."
Mr Black was the WA State manager of the Meat and Livestock Corporation before he moved into private enterprise, and he is currently the chairman of the South Australian Meat Industry Council.
SAMEX is a true Australian company—albeit one with branches in Brazil and China.
Life in Australia's variable and often hostile environment survives by being highly diverse; SAMEX survives in its own variable and occasionally hostile environments through a similar strategy.
"Our attitude to sovereign risk is not to have any more than 10 per cent exposure to any one market at any one time, to protect ourselves against market failure," Mr Black says.
That strategy has been one of the hedges employed by the company in the unpredictable Russian market, where SAMEX has been selling Australian meat for a decade.
In 2001, the Russian ruble crashed against the United States dollar, and the air was thick with stories of Russian importers walking from their contracts.
SAMEX's shipments were accounted for, thanks to the other rules enshrined in the company’s hard-earned international strategy: operate on higher margins in high-risk markets, get up-front payments, and only work with people you can trust.
At the World Food 2008 fair in Moscow last month, where Meat and Livestock Australia used industry collaborative agreements with exporters to establish a prominent Australian stand in the meat hall, Mr Black had a reunion with a Russian importer who paid up on a 2001 SAMEX shipment that he might have walked from.
Mr Black notes that because of the trust established in 2001, the relationship has survived through to a point where Russia has suddenly become one of the most promising markets for Australian meat anywhere in the world.
He's seen a similar process occur in Japan and Korea, where SAMEX was operating well before they became key markets.
Having watched these markets evolve, Mr Black argues that the small meat traders, with their willingness to take on the risk and waywardness of less developed countries, are the true pioneers of Australia's meat markets.
"The road is littered with the failures of traders, but it's only after they have succeeded that the big companies are prepared to step in," he says.
"Companies like ours establish the foothold in these countries."
Which leads him to a pet peeve: AQIS's current dominance in the early stages of market access.
"In Canberra now you have the tail wagging the dog," he says.
"They try and take the lead in terms of market access. But market access isn't just a technical issue: it's cultural and political, and it needs a whole of government approach.
"I think the industry needs to tell government what it needs to do to support exporters."
One thing government could learn, in Mr Black’s view, is when to get out of the way.
For all their skills, he says, organisations like MLA or Austrade can't talk the export bottom line—price—with overseas importers.
That's still the job of the traders.
Matthew Cawood spoke to Rob Black at World Food 2008 in Moscow, where he was a guest of MLA
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