ANZ welcomes Asia’s Pacific Islands push

Asian and particularly Chinese companies are fast moving into the Pacific Islands, and ANZ is pursuing their business.

Asian and particularly Chinese companies are fast moving into the Pacific Islands, and ANZ is pursuing their business through an innovative corporate play.

The bank is gaining a foothold as a financial partner of a number of China’s biggest state-owned companies by demonstrating its capacity to help them in island countries where ANZ has been ­established for a century or so.

Vishnu Mohan, ANZ’s Pacific chief executive, has established an Asian Business Centre in Suva, Fiji, where he is based, as a formal focus for this growing role.

Now it has been operating for almost 18 months, Mr Mohan told The Australian the bank had also assigned staff to pursue this role in Papua New Guinea, although as yet there was no formal centre. “The reason we set up the centre, is that as a super-regional bank which follows trade and investment paths, we identified this as a new need,” he said.

The initial focus of this wave of Asian companies has been on ­infrastructure and resources, but it is starting to diversify.

Mr Mohan said China’s trade with the Pacific had been growing rapidly — by 25 per cent a year for the past five years.

Ten years ago it was about $1 billion, now it is $4.5bn.

He said “most of our customers at the Asia Centre saw us as their logical starting point because we were also present at the other end, in their home city in Asia” — whether in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia or China.

Mr Mohan made several visits to China and other Asian countries for two years, talking with companies starting to operate in the region and establishing a rapport — working closely with the Chinese embassy in Fiji.

The centre is staffed by bankers who speak Mandarin and other Asian languages, and Mr Mohan said “we have also beefed up our teams in Samoa, Vanuatu and Timor-Leste, which are also starting to attract Asian and especially Chinese interest”. The centre has account opening forms in Chinese and uses a global transactions system drafted in Chinese.

ANZ has trained staff in Beijing and Shanghai to help with these transactions, and they have built a database on companies doing business in the islands, and make customer calls in China.

Mr Mohan, originally from Sri Lanka, worked in Africa for seven years, where he became familiar with the needs and challenges of Chinese businesses operating in different cultures far from base.

He was also chief executive in PNG, the biggest islands market for Chinese companies.