Long distance call.

• Author: Snow, Michael
• Position: North Carolina foreign trade - Includes related article about North Carolina banks with offices in Europe

LONG DISTANCE CALL

It was white-knuckle time for Wayne Cooper once again. In June, he got a middle-of-the-night distress call from his man in Monrovia. Revel forces eager to have Liberian President Samuel K. Doe's head on a platter were poised to storm the capital city, and his sales rep, Rodney Burge, wanted permission to get his wife and two children out before a blood bath began.

Cooper immediately gave his consent. First thing the next morning, he got on the horn to find out if the Burges had made their way to safety. Unable to get through, he flicked on CNN and caught footage of thousands of distraught travelers stranded at the Monrovia airport.

Two days later, he finally got hold of Burge, who now works for a company in Houston. Bombings and a pervasive fear the rebels might storm the city had his rep rervous. That set off another round of frantic phoning. Cooper finally connected with the Bristish Embassy in Washington and secured permission for the family to leave on one of the evacuation flights sponsored by the London government.

It was all in a day's work for Cooper, president and owner of Arcon Manufacturing Inc., a Charlotte-based manufacturer of grain silos and other agricultural products that go primarily to the Third World. In 22 years of doing business overseas, he and his nine employees have been involved in their share in adventure: In Ethiopia in 1974, following the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie; in 1982, when the Mexican economy virtually shut down; a year later in the Philippines, after the assassination of the popular dissident leader Benigno Aquino; and last year, after the massacre at Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

Insurrections and insurgencies naturally draw attention in the press, and that could help to explain why only about one in 10 North Carolina companies evern brothers to sell overseas. But such headline stories rarely present the overall picture.

"You have to measure the bad times against all the good years when you made money," Cooper says. "When the Shah was overthrown in Iran, someone told me that his company lost $3 million. I asked him how much they made the year before. His answer was, 'Well, that's different.'"

Despite its setbacks, Arcon has achieved overwhelming profitability in each of some 35 countries where representatives sell its products. And the $10 million in sales it expects this year - notwithstanding the relatively small losses it suffered in Liberia - will come entirely from foreign deals. Cooper prefers to sell exclusively to the international market. In fact, he wouldn't have it any other way. "The agriculture business here [in the United States] is extremely competitive," he says. "The potential for profit is so much greater abroad."

While Arcon earned its reputation - and its success - by bucking trends, more-conservative North Carolina companies remained uninterested, if not downright cynical, about the idea of exporting.

"We actually took foreign buyers with standing orders directly to showrooms only to be told that 'we really don't have time to get involved with his,'" says John Schmonsees, a trade specialist with the U.S. Department of Commerce in Greensboro...