Export Market Ebbs and Flows With Economy.

• Author: JONES, PATRICIA
• Position: Statistical Data Included

Japan is Alaska's number one trading partner, receiving $1.3 billion annually in seafood, timber, gas and other products.

Rick Pollock's travel time to his company's outpost office in the Russian Far East city of Yuzhno Sakhalinsk tripled last year when an Anchorage-based airline closed up shop.

As Lynden Inc.'s regional vice president for Alaska and the Russian Far East, Pollock regularly commutes from his home base in Anchorage to the capital city on Sakhalin Island, located about 2,500 miles from Alaska and just a few dozen miles north of Japan.

Pollock has been making that long-distance commute since 1993, when Lynden first opened a branch office in Yuzhno Sakhalinsk, part of the company's efforts to provide transportation and logistical services to off-shore oil and gas projects being developed on Sakhalin Island.

In recent years, Pollock's commute to the Sakhalin office has been relatively painless, due to direct flights offered by Anchorage-based Reeve Aleutian Airlines. Even with a refueling stop in Petropavlovsk, located on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the flight time between Anchorage and Yuzhno was less than 10 hours, Pollock said.

"Now we have to run through Asia, which adds another day," he said, describing the schedule change that came about when Reeve declared bankruptcy and shut down service late last year.

"It's a bit of a challenge, more so for personnel movement than for cargo," Pollock said. "Cargo can be stored, but you'd rather not have a person sitting around for a day."

Planning for such logistical hurdles is just part of the game for Alaska-based companies seeking to do business in a foreign country, whether they are exporting services such as Lynden or providing some of the state's rich natural resources in trade exchanges.

"It was really nice to have that Reeve flight, partially because we had a lot of control," Pollock said. "But the reality of the situation is that it isn't there anymore."

Successful entrepreneurs in Alaska have already learned to adapt to a somewhat unique business environment here, different due to the state's geographic and climatic conditions as well as the abundance of valuable natural resources.

After cutting their teeth here, a number of Alaska-based businesses are now taking those adaptive skills abroad, opening service offices or providing exports to a variety of foreign countries.

From oil-field service work in the Russian Far East to seafood and energy exports to Asian countries to camp management services in Antarctica, several Alaska...