Seafood: from Alaska to China: source of success in China seafood market not clear.

• Author: Tkacz, Bob

Alaska's international seafood exports have increased steadily since bottoming out at a dismal $700 million in 1998. Farmed fish had been slicing away prime pieces of Alaska's salmon markets worldwide for most of the decade and the Asian "economic flu" of 1997 added a more focused cut to the region that has long been the state's top seafood customer.

Not entirely coincidentally, the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute opened its first permanent office in China in 1997. Backed by country-specific funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Market Access Program, ASMI contracted with Shanghai-based Shengming Trade Co. Ltd., and principle Robin Wang. The partnership has won praise and continuing interest in Alaska seafoods, expanding from its Shanghai headquarters with offices in Beijing, Hong Kong and nearby Guangzhou, the epicenter of China's manufacturing takeover and the mainland's richest city.

Although it may be a chicken-and-egg question, plus a range of other factors that influence the efforts, the seafood industry's response has followed Alaska's marketing trend, with increasing interest in the Chinese market vis-a-vis Korea's.

"Companies come and go, but you're seeing more and more people, for the return business, coming back," said K.C. Dochtermann, ASMI's international promotions director.

The expense, and built-in difficulties of marketing in an economy as foreign to westerners as China's, is a huge hurdle to companies hoping to develop export trade, but the almost continual change also has been a continuing draw, according to Dochtermann, who began working with ASMI in 2000.

"The vast majority of (Chinese) buyers then were for the reprocessing sector. They were coming to buy raw product. They were looking for thousands of tons, literally, of pollock or pink salmon, or whatever it might be. We don't see that anymore," Dochtermann said during the China Fisheries and Seafood Exposition last November in Guangzhou.

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Instead, ASMI has found a strong high-end market and a slowly developing middle class, both of which want the best seafood their money can buy.

"That's why you see the Tridents here, people like that," Dochtermann said of Trident Seafoods, Alaska's largest seafood company. "They've got value-added products in their booths. That's for the local population, trying to get some local consumption-based marketing going."

It wasn't just Trident Seafoods hosting the largest U.S. booth at last year's China Expo...