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If you are in charge of the company you work for now, what strategic changes would you make to give your company a competitive edge?

I really enjoy my current job, particularly the fact it is challenging. I am exporter vis-a-vis the Chinese market, but in South Africa, I am in fact an importer. This dual role notwithstanding, I have to conduct careful market research, tough negotiations and be always on the lookout for more and better business opportunities. The demanding nature of the job means that I must muster all my intellectual resources in order to do the job well. This has forced me to improve both my professional expertise and my strength of my personality constantly.

I also enjoy the career opportunities that the job has brought me in the last two to three years. As I said, very few of my former classmates have moved so far or so far up the corporate ladder as I have in the last two to three years. This has brought me not only handsome monetary compensation but also professional respect from my friends and confidence in myself.

It used to be hard to say what I disliked about my job, but this has changed recently with the deepening Asian financial crisis. With the drastic devaluation of most Asian currencies and the Chinese government's determination to uphold the value of China's currency, Chinese products are getting increasingly expensive in foreign markets, particularly those emerging markets, including in South Africa. By now, we have lost all pricing advantage we ever had, which has made it increasing difficult for us to do business abroad. The dire situation has aggravated the already intense competition among Chinese exporters, who are racing to beat each other's offer of prices. This state of affairs simply cannot be allowed to continues for long, or we may lose significant amounts of money.

If I were promoted to the top management of the company, I would make a strategic change to our business. I do not want to abandon the South African or other African markets, and the market share we occupy will be needed in the future, say, after the Asian financial crisis comes to an end or China is forced to devalue its currency. No big company with long-term plans should pull out of the market and simply give up its market share to its competitors. But meanwhile, the company has to be doing commercially viable business to survive, or it will make no sense to talk about the future. So, every effort must be made to ensure that our loss of pricing advantages can be compensated for by better services and more value-added technologies.

But more importantly, we must shift the focus of our business if we want to be certain that we can ride out the financial crisis. For now, instead of exporting Chinese products for consumption in South Africa, we can import South African products, particularly raw materials and wine, which can now be bought at almost unprecedented bargain prices, thanks, again, to the financial crisis that has swept into Africa.

This will be good for China as a whole, too. One way or another, China's economic takeoff will have to happen. The country will need raw materials on a massive scale as it pursues a host of gargantuan infrastructure projects. The Asian financial crisis surely has given China headaches, but it should be taken to be nothing but a curse. China's imports are getting cheaper, which will help cut down the cost of its infrastructure projects and relieve the C