Programs recognising the achievement of people are always special. There are numerous factors that make the Australian Export Heroes Awards even more special. People who receive an Australian Export Hero award have fought and won on the international stage. They have made more sacrifices, traveled more and spent more time away from home than they would probably like to remember. They have that magic mix of good business skills blended with loads of passion.

Whether from big established business or from the family farm or factory, they all deserve special recognition for their vision, passion and sheer hard work and the Australian Export Heroes Award is an opportunity to thank them for their unique contribution as well as thank their families for their support along the way.

AIEx is now calling for nominations for the 2012 Australian Export Heroes Awards.

The nomination process is strictly confidential as the person being nominated is not made aware of this information unless they are subsequently invited to join the register. Details regarding the nomination process can be found by downloading the selection criteria and nomination form below:

2012 Australian Export Heroes Selection Criteria.

2012 Export Heroes Nomination Form.

Nominations close on Wednesday 29 February 2012 and the presentation ceremony will be held at Government House in Sydney early April 2012.

For further information please contact Lisa McAuley from the Australian Institute of Export on 02 8243 7400 or lisamcauley@aiex.com.au

12 National Award winners and the overall winner of the Prime Minister’s Australian Exporter of the Year award will be announced at this special ceremony at the Plaza Ballroom at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre on 8th December. The winners will be announced from a list of national finalists, winners in their respective categories at the State and Territory finals.

Minister for Trade, the Hon Dr Craig Emerson will be attending the ceremony along with other Federal, State and Territory ministers and important industry figures. Tickets are still available for those wishing to attend the event.

Picture caption: Winners at last year’s Australian Export Awards with Trade Minister Craig Emerson (centre). This year, the 49th Australian Export Awards will be held at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre on Thursday, 8 December 2011.

Hosted by SBS World News reader and financial journalist, Ricardo Goncalves, the Awards recognized the best in its ten categories. Arab Bank Australia took out the Banking and Financial Services Provider award while Best Business Chamber or Industry Association was awarded to Greater Western Sydney BEC.

Best Business Services Provider went to Pattens Group and XDOC was named best Education and Training Provider.
Best Foreign Currency Exchange Provider was awarded to Atlas Currency Exchange, Best Government Agency, Department or Program to Australian Customs and Border Protection and Best Large Freight, Logistics or Express Provider handed to DHL Express. JJ Lawson was awarded SME Freight Forwarder/Customers Broker, Ozdocs International named the number one Software, Technology or Online Solution and Sherpa Group named as Best Specialist Consultant.

Best Practice in International Trade was this years learning program theme for the show and featured how-to workshops, roundtables and country presentaitions featuring experts and successful SME case studies.
“The success we’ve had again this year proves that there is an ongoing need for a one-stop-shop delivering expert training and connection with providers for import export businesses,” said Feiler.

DHL’s Pfizer Direct distribution model garnered the logistics company two awards, for Logistics Leader and Top Third Party Logistics Supplier.

Pfizer Direct allows community pharmacies around Australia to order Pfizer’s prescription medicines for next business day delivery, through either their Pfizer representative or online, via a point of sale system, phone or fax.

“This project has been extremely significant, putting DHL Supply Chain at the forefront of the direct distribution business for the pharmacy sector,” said Saul Resnick, vice president of Life Sciences and Healthcare Australia at DHL Supply Chain.

Pfizer Australia has been a client of DHL’s for more than 12 years. The new distribution model, which started in February this year, has already seen more than 18 million items processed with a delivery rate higher than 99% for in full and on time performance.

“I am very proud of the team and all their efforts over the years towards the development, implementation and running of the Pfizer Direct distribution model. This award seals the terrific relationship we have with Pfizer that is going from strength to strength,” said Resnick.

DHL also achieved finalist status in the Supply Chain Innovation category.

The awards were launched to recognise excellence in customer service and innovation by service providers within the international trade sector.

Award categories include:

• Banking & Financial Services Provider
• Business Chamber or Industry Association
• Business Service Provider (including Specialist Consultants)
• Education & Training Provider
• Foreign Currency Exchange Provider
• Government Agency, Department or Program
• Large Freight, Logistics and Express Provider
• SME Freight Forwarder/Customs Broker
• Software or Technology Solution

Both service providers and importers or exporters who use these services can nominate using these forms.

Nominations are open until 15 July 2011.

Voting will take place online between 18 July and 1 September 2011.

Hosted by Slattery IT, the Tech23 technology showcase will be held at Surry Hills in Sydney on 23 August.

The awards are funded by the NSW Government. Deputy Premier and Minister for Trade and Investment Andrew Stoner encouraged innovative new companies to apply.

“Tech23 will give 23 of the best new Australian companies the chance to pitch their cutting edge technologies to an audience of around 400 potential investors, mentors, entrepreneurs and customers,” he said. “By bringing together the best emerging technologies and investors, Tech 23 is a practical initiative that helps foster new commercialisation and business opportunities.”

Awards include:

Broadband Innovation Award—$25,000 for the company whose business model, product, service or solution has the best ability to drive demand through broadband services

Outstanding Collaboration for Innovation Award—$25,000 for the company which best demonstrates active engagement in a business partnership or collaboration contributing to the development of their innovation

Community Contribution Award—$25,000 for the company best demonstrating how their innovation will significantly and measurably benefit their local or national community

Greatest Potential Award—$25,000 for the company which best demonstrates how they will progress their business model to the next level providing the greatest potential for growth and progress

Innovation Excellence Award—$50,000 for the company judged the best of the Tech23 by demonstrating how their innovation is unique, underpins company performance, industry dynamics, productivity change and economic growth.

For more information or to apply, visit Tech23.

Applications close on 24 June 2011. Successful applicants will be announced in mid-July.

Tourism Australia’s managing director Andrew McEvoy said the campaign has been an overwhelming success. “Winning awards is nice but it’s important tourism campaigns work—and this one is [working]. Australia’s inbound tourism achieved solid growth of 6 percent last year despite major economic challenges in many of our key overseas markets—a very credible achievement when many of our competitors have suffered declines.”

He credited the involvement of Australians in the campaign as crucial to its success. “These awards are really a pat on the back for the people of Australia, who brought their country to life by sharing their favourite Australian place or experience with the world.”

The campaign began as a consumer-generated promotion, with Australians uploaing nearly 30,000 stories and images to www.nothinglikeaustralia.com to highlight their favourite aspects of Australia to an international audience.

The website attracts more than 1 million unique visitors each month. Twenty-six of Tourism Australia’s 33 overseas markets are now running a campaign website in the local language. So far, international visitors have uploaded nearly 5,000 photos illustrating their experience of travel in Australia. Collectively, more than 3 million unique visitors look at the site each month.

The awards ceremony will be held in China in April at the PATA 60^th Anniversary and Conference.

Small Business Award: Epichem

With the slogan ‘Molecules made to order’ Epichem delivers drug discovery services to the pharmaceutical sector, engineering medicinal and synthetic compounds and conducting research on a contract basis. The Western Australian company runs two laboratories in Perth and Melbourne and has clients in 18 countries across the Americas and Europe, as well as South Africa and India.

The company provides contract research in synthetic and medicinal chemistry for new and improved pharmaceuticals, veterinary drugs and agrochemicals; design and synthesis of analogue libraries (artificially engineered chemical compounds); custom synthesis of both known and innovative chemical compounds; isolation, purification and analysis of unknown compounds and organic products; synthesis of impurities, degradants and metabolites of pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals as well as consultancy and project management services.

Being based in Australia means Epichem can provide competitive rates for its services compared to the US, for example, and has developed a business model that offsets the risky nature of the enterprise by funding its operations from its products and fee-for-service work.

Since starting up in 2004 Epichem has generated its own intellectual property, which is now entering the commercialisation phase with options and licensing negotiations currently under way.

It is also involved with a major global initiative generated by the Switzerland-based not-for-profit organisation Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) to find a cure for Chagas disease, a parasitic afflicting that affects approximately 10 million people. Working collaboratively with pharmaceutical scientists from university research units in Australia and Brazil, Epichem’s team of five chemists identified a critical ‘hit’ molecule for treating the disease, now in lab testing, according to Epichem’s head of drug discovery Dr Martine Keenan. This important research breakthrough will add to the company’s growing international reputation.

Exporter of the Year: Future Fibre Technologies

The Prime Minister’s Australian Exporter of the Year award went to Future Fibre Technologies (FFT), which was also the Small to Medium Manufacturer category winner. The Melbourne-based company is recognised as a world leader in the security systems industry.

Providing perimeter protection that can accurately locate breaches gives FFT a competitive edge in the global security market. Where other systems deliver alerts of an occurrence, FFT pushes the laser-based technology to enable more advanced analysis, identifying the location of an intrusion. The technology took four years to develop from inception in 2002, and a further four to trial.

“We can identify an intrusion event and give a very accurate indication where it is,” says chief executive Rob Broomfield. “We use one cable and through our system we can locate to the metre where the physical intrusion would be.”

This degree of accuracy, combined with the ability to cover 80 kilometres, made the system the preferred choice for perimeter protection and pipeline security for industrial, military, petrochemical and government sites. The company exports 90 percent of its product, with sales doubling every year from 2006 to 2009. Since its establishment in 1994, FFT has supplied more than 1 million metres of fibre optic security cabling to organisations including the United States army, navy and air force, BP, Shell and NATO, plus many other industrial, military and government organisations.

The company’s fibre optic cable systems are coupled with proprietary artificial intelligence technology that discriminates between false alerts and real events, and are immune to electromagnetic and radio frequency interference. FFT provides perimeter fences, pipeline security, data tapping protection and central alarm monitoring systems compatible with CCTV camera systems, devices using the Modbus communication protocol, high level security management and access control systems via TCP/IP.

Austrade’s state manager for Victoria Sally-Ann Watts described the company as a thought leader in its industry, due to the publication of its annual Boundaries of Security Report, regarded as the most comprehensive report on current global trends in perimeter security. “This document is now widely accepted as an industry reference source and has positioned FFT as the primary expert in this field,” she said.

I was recently at a meeting in Adelaide with the SA Minister for Trade Tom Koutsantonis and this very subject came up. The question was asked: “How do we ensure in the future our support continues to be relevant to assist this new breed in their export pursuits?”

It’s a very good question because some of the traditional export assistance programs don’t always fit with their dynamic business model and more often than not the world is their market from day one. What differentiates them though in terms of their competitive advantage is technology, the application of that technology and their drive to build a modern international business in many cases from the start. Being limited to the domestic market is simply not a consideration.
So what sort of companies are these new age exporters? Let me give you some examples of companies that I’ve come into contact with through the export awards program that I find simply fascinating.

The first is Atlassian Corporation. This very successful company didn’t exist 10 years ago. Today it employs 225 people and markets to 20 thousand customers across 134 countries. Atlassian was founded in 2001 by university colleagues Mike Cannon-Brooks and Scott Farquhar, both aged 22. They make development and collaboration tools that enable customer companies to deliver quality software products faster, from concept to launch. Atlassian describes themselves as different kind of software company, one that has rewritten the rules of enterprise software development and sales. What also makes them different is the fact that they encourage customers to download products from their website with a credit card at a fraction of the cost of competitors’ products. And it works, in 2010 their revenue is forecast to be $59 milllion.

Another example is the SMARTS Company. The SMARTS products began life in the research labs of the University of Sydney at a time when the Australian Securities market became one of the first in the world to automate and integrate six regional stock exchanges into one national trading platform. SMARTS market surveillance software is the unrivalled market leader with over 30 national exchange and regulatory customers as well as 50 national and multinational broking clients across 30 markets. As I understand it, in the world of stockbroking there are five major software providers. Three of them came out of Australia, and SMARTS is of course one of them.

Nuix also falls into the category of a new age exporter. Created in 2000, Nuix’s focus has always been on developing the world’s most advanced eDiscovery and electronic investigation software. The core of Nuix is an advanced processing engine which interrogates virtually any data set (emails, hard disks and disk images), indexing the results and making them available for immediate analysis. Nuix commenced actively commercialising its software in Australia in 2006 and over the next 12 months quickly expanded its Australian customer base to include a large number of major corporate and government, forensic and security, law enforcement, legal and regulatory organisations.

In 2007 Nuix began to participate in other markets and now has customers in over 26 countries, including the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Hong Kong, China and Japan, and offices in the UK, Europe and USA.

These three companies are but examples of what an increasing number of our exporters look like. They don’t put things in boxes and ship them around the world, they use technology, they are often young well qualified people who don’t see borders as a challenge. All of us involved in export, including government, need to sit up and take note of this changing picture. I’m certainly not promoting interference but what I am promoting is doing research to understand them better so that programs can be put in place to build this capability and get more Atlassian, SMARTS and Nuixes across the export line.

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