I'll say that it was a concerted joint effort, so I'll highlight that right off the top.
It was critical to have the federal government funding. The Government of B.C. put funding in, and the industry stepped forward. Having that solid funding base to establish boots on the ground in China was of paramount importance.
We had to do the very unsexy stuff in China around codes and standards in order to be able to have our products and our building systems accepted in that jurisdiction. The blueprint from that, as Mr. Giroux talked about earlier, is around building codes and those kinds of things, and having the science behind us to be able to go into foreign jurisdictions like China and get building codes that use our technologies and our products established in those jurisdictions.
That was the first thing. That was very much a joint effort among academia, government, industry, and our research institutions.
The second thing was promotions. We went there and we established a Canada wood brand. You may or may not know that in China they probably don't know where Vancouver and B.C. are, but they certainly know Canada. Thank you, Dr. Bethune. Running a Canada brand there was very important in terms of differentiating ourselves and establishing a marketplace.
It was just a lot of hard work to keep on top of those codes, to focus geographically, to expand our efforts as we got successes, to keep on with the promotional efforts, and to keep educating the Chinese consumer.
We have great success there, as James has mentioned in terms of stats. What's next for us is that we have to increase the amount of wood used in building there. That means doing exactly the same things there that we're doing here in Canada—learning the lessons we have from WoodWorks and from the Canadian Wood Council, and pushing the tall buildings envelope and the innovation envelopes to say that wood can be used in things other than residential applications.
I'll stop there because I don't want to monopolize time. I could go on for a long time.