10 London Business Matters Your business

Notes from a journey to Nepal and South East Asia

Asia weathers the economic storm
LBM editor Peter Bishop recently
visited Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia
and Singapore in pursuit of various
LCCI international trade projects.
This is his Asian diary.
it took ten hours to drive the 125 miles
from Kathmandu to the second city,
Pokhara – I flew back to the capital in
35 minutes, air travel being vastly more
efficient. There is currently just one rail
track, 30 miles across the Nepal – India
border but there are ambitious plans to
build new rail and road links connect-
ing Nepalese towns as well as India and
China. I was told by Dhruba Raj Regmi
of the Ministry of Physical Planning that
the roads would connect with the massive
Trans-Asian highway project linking Iran
with Singapore, which left me wonder-
ing how they would deal with the left and
right road systems.
in the news and as a recent traveller from
an affected area I was singled out for
some less-than-tough questions about my
health and Mexican connections, and
given an emergency phone number to ring
if my condition changed for the worse. I
was feeling fine however and looking for-
ward to a night in the Shangri-La hotel
(see review on page 16).
egg for breakfast. In between I slept on
the widest, most comfortable train berth
I’ve experienced, and gazed out from the
South Korean-made train at row after
row of palm oil and rubber trees.
I took the short ferry ride from Butterworth
to Penang, the first British possession in
Southeast Asia, with a view of the grace-
ful suspension bridge which connects the
island with the mainland, and headed
for Traders Hotel in Georgetown, anoth-
er Shangri-La group hotel up for review.
That evening I walked to the colonial
part of town to meet an old friend in the
tautologically-named Eastern & Oriental
Hotel (below), set up by the American

F
IRST stop Kathmandu to
deliver the latest workshops
in the EU-funded ECIBON
programme – Enhancing
the Capacity of Business
Organisations in Intermediary Business
Organisations. Infrastructure is one of
the topics, and developments in trans-
port and communications are debat-
ed with government officials. Some
incredible statistics emerge, for exam-
ple in some parts of Nepal there is a 13
day hike to the nearest road.
When there are roads they are gener-
ally sub-standard. During my last visit
Fierce competition
They drive on the left in Nepal but it’s
not always obvious as there is fierce
competition for space on narrow roads
from cars, two wheelers, lorries, pedes-
trians and cows. But even my expe-
rienced taxi driver looked surprised
when our progress to Lazimpat was
impeded by an elephant on the road.
From Nepal’s redbrick Tribhuvan
International airport I flew with Thai
Airways to the vast glass and steel struc-
ture of Suvarnabhumi airport (pictured
above right) in Bangkok. Swine flu was
Sarkies brothers in the 1880s, a couple of
years before they opened Raffles Hotel in
Singapore.
I was still a weekend away from the
World ATA Carnet meeting and World
Chambers Congress, both taking place
in Kuala Lumpur, and had decided to use
the time to travel down the Malaysian
Peninsular by train, Paul Theroux-style.
Just over £20 bought me a ticket on
the overnight train from Bangkok to
Butterworth, with chicken and a bottle
of Singha beer for dinner, and a fried

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Your business
“I visited a shipbroker’s office on the 25th floor
of One Raffle’s Quay and looked down on
the hundreds of boats laying off the world’s
largest port or negotiating the Strait
of Malacca, one of the world’s busiest seaways”
Iconic
The next day, my duties fulfilled at the
Traders, I headed south to KL through
more rubber and palm oil planta-
tions and long stretches of building
work where much-need additional rail
tracks were under construction. My
first engagement in the capital was to
attend a dinner of the World Chambers
Federation executive committee at
the Petroleum Club in the iconic
Petronas Towers (left), hosted by
ICC chairman Victor Fung, a former
Harvard Business School profes-
sor and a major player on the Hong
Kong business scene. Over the next
few days I chaired a meeting of
the World ATA Carnet Council,
ran two seminars on the Carnet
document itself (‘the passport for
goods’), signed a memorandum of
understanding on behalf of LCCI
with the Kuala Lumpur Malay
Chamber of Commerce (above),
and attended a number of ses-
sions of the World Chambers
Congress, including the open-
ing ceremony which featured
a special message from Bill
Clinton.
Another round of meetings
took me to the British High
Commission, a compound on
Visit www.londonchamber.co.uk and click GOING GLOBAL for our international trade menu
the outside, a pleasant quasi-hotel within. I
had a drink with Patrick Moody, the high-
ly-personable Deputy High Commissioner,
in the Elizabethan bar which looks on to
the tennis court and swimming pool. I had
earlier breakfasted with Boyd McCleary,
the British High Commissioner, who dem-
onstrated a vast knowledge of the business
set-up and opportunities in Malaysia and
a keen appetite to get British companies
more involved. [Readers should refer to the
feature on page 14 of the
■
■
■
■ ■
■ ■
■ ■
Visit www.lo
ndonchamb
er.co.uk and
click
May 09 issue of London Business Matters
for more on this.]
London Chamber of Commerce mem-
bers of course have an additional chan-
nel to business in the region thanks to
our links with the KL Malay Chamber.
The Chamber’s International Affairs
Chief is Tharmapalan Karthigasu,
known to all as ‘Tharma’, who is a mine
of information on the country’s recent
economic history and briefed me in the
wonderful surroundings of the Royal
Selangor Club in Merdeka Square. It
is generally agreed that the founda-
tion for Malaysia’s current prosper-
ity was laid by former Prime Minister
Dr.Mahathir bin Mohamad, known as
the ‘Father of Modernisation’.
Between 1981 and 2003 he diversified
the country’s economic base which had
been too dependent on world commodity
prices, privatised the utilities – you can
now drink the tap water with impunity
– and commissioned the breathtaking
Petronas Towers which put KL firmly on
the world map. He also introduced the
monorail system which took me to KL
Sentral (sic) railway station for the last
leg of my journey down the Malaysian
Peninsula to Singapore.
On the island I visited a shipbroker’s
office on the 25th f loor of One Raff le’s
Quay and looked down on the hun-
dreds of boats laying off the world’s
largest port or negotiating the Strait
of Malacca, one of the world’s busi-
est seaways. Later that day I went to
one of Asia’s biggest shopping centres
in Orchard Road where eager shop-
pers were being made to queue outside
shops for fear of overcrowd-
ing – I haven’t noticed that
in Oxford Street recently.
Indeed the amount of eco-
nomic activity I witnessed
from Bangkok down to the
tip of the peninsula gave no
hint that this was a region in
recession. Even in Kathmandu
I was told that their economic
barometer – the number of
tourists, especially trekkers –
was set fair.
Back in London after a 13 hour
■
f light there seemed to be heavier
■
traffic than usual. More evidence
■
■
that the congestion charge, based
on the Singapore model, was not
working? No, we were in day one
of a tube strike, Bob Crow’s wel-
come to Britain.
GOING GLO
BAL for our inte
rnational trad
e menu
July/August 2009 11
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