What Is EMDG Telling Us About Australian Exporters?
by VideoTranslator Support| Nov 20, 2022
Apa yang EMDG katakan kepada kita tentang eksportir Australia?

The Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade) is the Australian Government’s international trade promotion and investment attraction agency.

Austrade’s Export Market Development Grants (EMDG) program helps Australian businesses grow their exports in international markets, primarily via Free Trade Agreements.

Recently, Round 2 of the EMDG program closed, and with it, we have the chance to look at some of the statistics Austrade published, about who is exporting and where to - which we at VideoTranslator are super interested in!

Why are we interested? Because many of our prospects/clients use this program to fund their outreach into markets across APAC!

EMDG 2021 (Round 1) - Statistics

For context, the basic statistics for Round 1 of the EMDG scheme were as follows:

  • 5,384 applications were submitted
  • Applications by State/territory are:
    • 66 in the ACT (1.2%)
    • 2,154 in NSW (40%)
    • 8 in the NT (0.1%)
    • 875 in Qld (16.3%)
    • 310 in SA (5.8%)
    • 41 in Tas (0.8%)
    • 1,505 in Vic (28.0%)
    • 425 in WA (7.8%)

More importantly, when we look at the same numbers by category, we get the below.

emdg-round-1-product-category.jpg
 

The source data used is below - and what is interesting is (a) services, and especially value-added services exports make up about the same as goods exports, and (b) tourism exports are very low.

emdg-round-1-key-statistics-by-product-category.jpg
Applications by Product Category

The first stat makes sense, but the second is a bit puzzling and we don’t fully understand why this would be the case.

EMDG 2021 (Round 1) - Top Markets

The top 10 markets for EMDG 2021
 

emdg-round-1-key-statistics-top-markets.jpg

That is a pretty interesting graph. The way to read this graph is that exporters tend to export to more than one market, so it doubles up.

As in 46.7% of exporters were looking to export to the USA, so the point of the pie chart is to show that the majority of exports are going to the Anglosphere - not that ~27% is going to the USA.

What does this graph tell us?

  • Firstly, since the USA is such a big market, maybe invest in Spanish as your second language.
  • Secondly, if you export to both France and Canada, maybe French would work for you as well.
  • Third, Singapore, China and HK - the slice next to India where the label has mysteriously disappeared - all have sizeable Chinese-speaking populations, so maybe content creation in Chinese is a good plan.
  • Lastly, you are probably better off focusing on German, as opposed to Hindi - because India has many languages - so the per language ROI is probably lesser in India.

EMDG 2022 (Round 2)

The second round just finished, so there is still limited data.

emdg-round-2-key-statistics.jpg
EMDG 2022 Applications by product category

Some observations:

  • Tourism has doubled, which makes sense - it may have been depressed as a lingering after-effect of Covid 19.
  • Services generally have increased, which makes sense as Covid related disruptions come to an end.

Outside of that, we are waiting on more information to become available.

Summary

First off, shout out to AusTrade for taking the time to put these statistics together. Any errors or misunderstanding regarding what the data means is wholly on our side.

We did not reach out to AusTrade, this blog post is simply commentary, and should only be relied on to the extent that it gives an indication of what we think is happening.

Also - so some of the recommendations are tongue in cheek because this will vary hugely depending on exactly what you are selling.

But…

If you already have the infrastructure in place to sell to a specific country, adding content creation via video translation is probably a decent strategy to get you additional ROI on both existing and new content spending.

Reach out if we can help!

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