The first thing you need to do business in China is find someone native you can trust. For me, it was matter of luck. I had been writing about the battery industry in China for some years when one year, I visited a trade show in Beijing and met a loyal fan. He recognized my picture from the magazine. Then he said a strange thing: “I want to work with you.” For a moment, I thought he’d made a grammatical error. But it was exactly what he meant.
At that time, I had no idea how my magazine would use Liang but from that moment he became our Man Friday in China, my trip planner, my door opener, translator and companion in a very strange land.
That was 2004. I had launched Batteries and Energy Storage Magazine just a year earlier and my business partner and I were more than aware that China was becoming the biggest producer of batteries of all kinds, from car starter batteries, to lithium ion batteries for mobile phones and lap tops and a whole lot of technologies in between.
We suspected there would be battery machine making companies in China who would want to advertise their goods and services outside the country. BEST is seen in 90 countries. Before long, Liang had arranged complicated trips for me across the country. We first travelled by bus and train, but as resources allowed, we became China Airline frequent fliers. Company profiles and advertising contracts rolled in. By 2007, 15% of our advertising revenue was coming from China. And the magazine was still in English. But it took another three years before we made the next leap.
Producing a magazine in Mandarin, for the Chinese market for western companies trying to advertise and sell their services to the Chinese was an obvious move. The indigenous competition is abysmal. Little more than catalogues. By contrast, BEST has a huge back catalogue of technical articles and a sense of what is “industry news”.
So in June this year, we put a toe in the water, getting article abstracts translated into Mandarin Chinese, producing the page layouts in the UK and printing the magazine in Shen Zhen at a fraction of the price you could do in the UK. We test marketed a taste of BEST, with a handful of western advertisers by distributing it a trade fair in China.
It was very well received. The first issue of Chinese BEST launches in November; this time all articles fully translated with just the abstracts in English. We’ll follow up later this year with our electric vehicle title, EV Land Sea and Air.
The UK has a great tradition of good trade and technical magazines. Sadly, there’s little left in terms of a manufacturing base in the UK for such publications to serve. But there is in China. And that’s whom we plan to serve in our next phase of growth.
