Biz ‘matchmaker’ explores NMI’s potential
Water and power infrastructure, as well as aquaculture and horticulture, seem to have great potentials in the CNMI, according to visiting “business matchmaker” Tomas Kandl of the Department of the Interior’s Island Fellows Program.
Kandl, a Wharton School intern, said this is based on his initial discussions with local business people and government officials.
“Water is a very important subject here on the island. It has a lot of potentials and great opportunities for investment,” he said.
Water and power infrastructure type of investments, he said, are promising because these are “of need to the islands.”
Aside from tourism, other potential industries would be “aquaculture and exotic fruits and flowers that have potentials in the Asian market.”
Kandl arrived on Thursday for a two-week “business identification” trip in the CNMI in preparation for the Sept. 2004 DOI-sponsored investment conference for insular areas in Los Angeles.
“My role here is to help local businesses have a venue through the conference, to meet with investors and companies who are interested in investing here…I am helping, as a matchmaker, to [bring the] right people on both sides [together] so that businesses can be developed here in a sustainable manner,” he said.
So far, he said he has met with the Saipan Chamber of Commerce, CNMI Water Task Force, Commonwealth Development Authority, and government officials.
He visited Rota over the weekend.
“I hope to spend these two weeks to meet with as many people as I can,” he said.
He said several business groups in the U.S. have yet to know of investment opportunities in the island territories like the CNMI.
“We’d want them to have a sense of what opportunities are here. A lot of investors [and] business people in the U.S. have no sense of what the opportunities are here on Saipan,” he said.
Kandl, who was a guest in yesterday’s Rotary Club weekly meeting, said his trip is mainly to lay out the groundwork for the conference, and not to come up with a study. This means he would be identifying who from the CNMI needs to attend the conference and who would make business presentations during the meeting, with the goal of meeting their “match” investors.
“Two groups of people are meeting there to talk about business enterprises, cooperation, and investment opportunities,” he said.
The DOI will hold its annual investment conference for the islands in California in September this year, which will be attended for the first time by the Freely Associated States: Marshall Islands, Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia.
During the Sept. 2003 investment conference in Washington D.C., only the CNMI, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa participated.
This year’s summit is primarily a follow-up on last year’s business prospects.
