One of the questions that comes up often at the Go Global sessions—it's directly related to your question, and I wanted to mention earlier there was a question around the take-up of these things—is that there are two panels. One of them is about what each of the government agencies does. The other panel is a panel of CEOs of companies that no one's heard of, for the most part, unless you're really involved in certain sectors. These are companies talking about how they exported, how they took that first step, the challenges that they encountered, and how they worked with local government officials to export. That's something to keep in mind.
The question that comes up often is “What's the spend?” SMEs will often look at a foreign market—and let's discount the U.S. because that's usually the default foreign market. When they're looking at a new market, a non-U.S. market, often companies will think about what the budget is that they will have to put together to penetrate that market. It's highly specific to the company. Some companies' export strategies are working though sales agents and through distributors, in which case often they'll go to a market for the first time and they'll establish a relationship with distributors. The spend for those companies is highly dependent on their ability to get to that market and the business relationship with those distributors.
For other companies that are importing with a view to exporting to a large multinational, or tapping into a large supply chain, their spend is also very different. That's one of the reasons why in my comments I was talking more about structuring the fund so the number one criteria is high export potential. That includes putting forward project ideas that may have selling into a supply chain or global value chain as part of the project criteria or part of the project description. To me, and to CME, that should be more equally weighted in terms of value, than a company who's saying, “I'm going to sell product A to a foreign market.”
It depends on the company and therefore the spend depends as well. That's why, I think, we have to structure it to a maximum amount. Companies should be willing to put forward matching funds. If they're going to be serious about this type of investment then they need to think about how they can manage that by putting forward matching funds.