Our latest export to America: business knowledge
 Business
A PhD student in the Business School will fly to Washington this month to present a paper that could impact on the success of Australian service exporters. Twenty-seven-year-old Vinh Lu has spent the past three years researching the key success drivers of Australian service exporters. His findings could change the way Australian businesses operate in overseas markets as there is very limited knowledge available to help national service exporters understand the determinants of their international success. "Australia-wide we've got around 2600 service exporters contributing more than 20% to our annual exports of goods and services, valued at approximately 45 billion dollars. We also account for 1.2% of global export of services but know very little about the performance of these firms," Mr Lu said. He collected data from 254 service exporters around Australia, ranging from construction firms, to computing, IT, consulting and business, training and transportation businesses. A $2500 Mutual Community Travel Grant will help fund Mr Lu's United States visit, where he will present a paper to the American Marketing Association Frontiers in Service Conference in Washington on "Government Policies and the Export Performance of Service Firms". In this paper, he examined the extent to which the support from the Australian government and the policies imposed by foreign governments may impact the success of Australian service exporters. "The findings indicate that the favourable policies by foreign government and the support from Australian government agencies have a positive and significant impact on the firms' commitment to their export ventures, which in turn determines the firms' success." The doctoral candidate has also looked at a number of other key factors that play a large role in the success of Australia's service exporters. They include international experience, resource commitments, and foreign competition. "Importantly I also researched how service exporters achieved strong performance by successfully managing their business-to-business relationship with their overseas clients." Almost 50% of the businesses he surveyed reported an annual turnover of less than $10 million, although 10% of the respondents generated total income of more than $200 million. Just over a third had been in international business for more than 20 years and 55% exported their services to less than five countries. Mr Lu is a third-year PhD student at the 成人大片 Business School, supervised by Professor Pascale Quester and Dr Chris Medlin. In 2007 his PhD project received an Honourable Mention in an international Business Marketing Doctoral Research Competition organised by Pennsylvania State University. He has also presented papers on his research at conferences in Australia, New Zealand, Italy, and the Netherlands. Story by Candy Gibson
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