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In the face of the worldwide financial meltdown and rising oil prices, a handful of New Brunswick business executives are reaching out to the rest of the world

When Saint John tech firm Mariner Partners Inc. looked to Europe, it saw opportunity aplenty.

But as a small firm with no global cachet, what it needed first was a way to break in to the market for its signature product in monitoring Internet television services.

Mariner found it in a partnership agreement with Endurance Technology. The British firm is a consultant to television providers. It's a player in the game but not a threat to Mariner's efforts of jumping in.

"We looked at who else is playing in that landscape - who already has good penetration in the European market that are not our competitors," says Mike MacNeil, Mariner's senior marketing director.

That was in March. Mariner, whose software alerts Internet Protocol TV providers to potential trouble with their feeds, more recently formed a partnership with Israeli company Orca Interactive, which develops the software for the set-top box that converts the broadband feed into an image on the TV screen.

Orca has more than 15 European clients from the pool of about 30 IPTV service providers. And now Mariner has a way in, an introduction that it hopes will pay off handsomely.

"If we have someone like an Orca who's already in those accounts "¦ that's a big jumpstart," MacNeil says.

Europe is the biggest market for Mariner - there are more than 10.9 million IPTV subscribers there, compared to only 3.3 million in North America.

As the debate rages about whether the worldwide financial meltdown and rising oil prices will spell the end of globalization, MacNeil and other New Brunswick business executives, which are only now reaching out to the rest of the world, are forging ahead.

With some forecasting IPTV will swell to about 100 million subscribers worldwide within the next five years, MacNeil can only continue to be enthusiastic about opportunity abroad.

For other New Brunswick companies, such as the Moncton Flight College, international business is chugging along.

The pilot training school first landed a contract with Beihang University in 2006 with the help of an export consultant. The contract has since been renewed and the college has landed five other Chinese deals. Of the roughly 490 students at the college about 340 of them are from China.

Though the economic downturn has taken a bite out of airline travel, the college's principal and chief executive Mike Doiron says the need for Chinese pilot training has remained the same.

"They're taking airplanes off their international routes and putting them on their domestic routes because they're having a decreasing demand internationally and an increasing demand domestically, which is reflective of the international economy," he says.

University of Toronto global marketing professor Andrij Brygidyr says this is a common trend, but is more often caused by protectionist actions by governments

He says politicians around the world looking to save jobs at home have either implemented domestic content regulations, at least on government contracts, or imposed import tariffs.

This makes exporting more difficult, Brygidyr says, and there's not much companies can do about it, unless they are conglomerates. He says its government's role to negotiate with protectionist countries and the only thing businesses can do, unless it's a conglomerate, is a good job.

"Do common things uncommonly well," he says quoting Albert Einstein. "Produce good quality things and deliver them on time and within budget."

But since November New Brunswick's exports have been down around $700 million, recovering to almost $800 million in March, the latest month Statistics Canada has information for, despite a relatively low loonie. Over the 12 months before the downturn the province's exports ranged from the lowest of $880 million in February, 2008 to a high of $1.48 billion in July of that year.

Now with the loonie on the rise exports are currently at a disadvantage. "It's all based on price," Brygidyr says. "When a price is good people would buy it."

Brygidyr cautions companies to strongly consider other options before looking towards distant export markets, even in good times and especially in the current global economic climate.

"Is it really worth the effort and the risk to do that and could you find a similar opportunity closer to home?" he says. "Only go global when there's a phenomenal opportunity that doesn't exist here or you've simply exhausted your local markets."

Former CIBC World Market chief economist Jeff Rubin says companies will soon be forced to sell to local markets because, he predicts, the price of oil will soon rise to a point that shipping across an ocean won't be worthwhile.

"We're still going to trade with the United States and probably with Mexico," Rubin says. "We're not going to trade with countries on the other side of the world, we're going to trade with our geographic neighbors."

"And maybe even our trade with the U.S. and Mexico will even increase," he says.

He says technology will be increasingly important in the future, and a small New Brunswick company providing a service that doesn't require much shipping or travel will do relatively well.

"They're OK," he says. "Just don't set up a steel plant there to ship steel to China."