MACKINAC ISLAND – Five years after shuttering most of its foreign trade offices, state officials are drawing up plans to reopen up to three of them in an effort to revitalize its global economic ties.
The state, which at one point had nine foreign offices, closed most of them in 1999 as part of a new strategy emphasizing the use of Michiganders to work with businesses in other countries. Just two remain: one in Mexico City and another in Shanghai.
Final decisions have not yet been made, but the state will likely reopen offices in Europe, Canada and in eastern Asia, said Don Jakeway, CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.
As part of its efforts abroad, Jakeway and Governor Jennifer Granholm are planning a trade mission to an unannounced country later this year or in early 2005. Both officials were tight-lipped on what the mission would entail.
Granholm said the state must have a presence around the world.
“In order to compete, we must have relationships with those countries,” she said. “Other countries base so much of their decision-making on relationships. And if you don’t have those relationships, they are not going to choose Michigan.”
Jakeway said the state lost critical continuity in its relationships with businesses in other countries by closing most of its foreign offices.
“That’s the toughest thing, I think, to re-establish – getting that trust back,” he said.
Jakeway said he would be working over the next three years to make recommendations on how many offices would open and where.
In 1999, the state quietly closed its offices in London, Cologne, Brussels and Tokyo while folding offices in Toronto and Johannesburg into consortiums in those cities where the efforts of Great Lakes states were concentrated.
At the time, the state’s then economic development chief Doug Rothwell said the new system would be an improvement. “In the past it has been the practice to contract with foreign nationals to perform this type of attraction work; however, it is our belief that only those with an intimate knowledge of Michigan can do justice to the high quality of life and business opportunity that exists in the Great Lakes State,” Rothwell said in a letter to lawmakers.
The state at one point had as many as nine trade offices throughout the world in Toronto, Mexico City, London, Brussels, Cologne, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Johannesburg, which was the last office created when it opened in January 1997. When Hong Kong was returned to the control of the People’s Republic of China in 1997, the Hong Kong office was consolidated with Shanghai.
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