Arkansas’s Global Stars: The Governor’s Trade Awards

The 12th annual Governor’s Award for Excellence in Global Trade recognized some of Arkansas’ best and brightest exporters. Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Jonathan Bricker, chair of the Arkansas District Export Council (ARDEC) presented the awards to winners in six different categories in a ceremony at the Governor’s Mansion on Oct. 5. The recognition serves to spread the good word of Arkansas’ growing export economy and support the businesses behind it.

The event was hosted by ARDEC, a nonprofit division of the larger National District Export Council and is composed of prominent members of the Arkansas business community selected by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Bricker is one such member, having cut his teeth in Arvest’s international department. Having since risen to Vice President of Commercial Banking, his experience in helping clients mitigate the risks of dealing with overseas suppliers and buyers makes him well-suited to ARDEC’s mission of supporting and expanding Arkansas’ exports through education and consultation.

“If you catch an order from, say, Singapore, you might think, ‘I don’t even know where to start.’ That’s what the DEC is for,” Bricker said. “We lead companies to exporting, but we also help businesses that already are exporting to build better processes. If these companies grow their bottom line by selling goods across the world, that means they will have to produce more, and when they produce more, they’re going to have to hire more people, and more people means more sales tax revenue for their communities. It’s a win for everybody.”

There certainly is a great deal of potential in exportation. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, about 96% of the world’s consumers live outside the U.S., accounting for 66% of the world’s purchasing power and 92% of its economic growth. Though tapping into such a massive resource is intimidating, plenty of Arkansas companies have proven that it is both achievable and worthwhile.

The value of Arkansas’s exports in 2021 was $5.6 billion, marking an 8% increase over 2020. In 2020, some 350,000 Arkansas jobs were directly or indirectly supported by exporting businesses. Most exports went to either Canada or Mexico, two of the closest and strongest trade partners for the U.S. in general.

But while you might expect agricultural products, particularly rice, to be the state’s biggest export, they don’t even make it into the top five. The honor of number one goes to the aerospace industry, accounting for nearly 15% of Arkansas’s total export value in 2021, with the biggest buyers coming from the United Kingdom, France and Germany. Rounding out the top five are nuclear reactors and related equipment, plastics, arms and ammunition, and electrical machinery, in that order.

If you think exporting is only a game for big businesses, you’d be wrong there too: 80% of Arkansas exporters are small or medium-sized businesses like last year’s winner of the Rising Star category, Conway-based Leather Brothers, which sells high-quality pet goods. With a market as big as the entire world, there’s a niche for everyone.

After a committee of ARDEC members scouts for businesses that may be a fit for the awards categories, application forms are sent out and then reviewed by another committee. Applicants are judged not only on their international sales numbers, but also employees, what countries they export to and where they are looking to expand next.

“That’s also another way we can help,” Bricker said. “The Arkansas World Trade Center in Rogers is a strategic partner of ours. We kind of overlap in what we’re trying to do. If we have a new company that’s looking to break into an international market, I can make that introduction into the World Trade Center or U.S. Commercial Service. We can help them look for either a new distributor in certain markets or, most of the time, these exporting companies are also importing goods, so we may be able to help them find a new supplier as well.

“We are a community of connections, if you will. That’s why, on the DEC, I’ve got attorneys, bankers, entrepreneurs, agricultural people, and I’ve got people with the University of Arkansas. We’ve strategically got people placed in certain sectors or companies or whatnot that can help anyone who comes to us and says, ‘Hey, I’m trying to do this, walk me through that process.’ I can help you on the finance side, and then I can also introduce you to whoever the expert might be in your sector to act as a mentor.”

The award itself is another boon to the company that wins it. Bricker recounted a few quotes from previous winners.

The aforementioned Leather Brothers noted: “We sent out a press release to all of our raw material vendors informing them of the award. By doing this, it bettered our relationship with our vendors, but also helped push some export accounts we’ve struggled selling into in the past, which has resulted in an increase of exports overall.”

Sherwood-based ECOJOHN, last year’s Small Company winner, reported: “We received a lot of recognition in our community, as well as from our customers all over the world. Internally, it has motivated our employees, and it is something new hires find very positive.”

SMART Repro in Jonesboro, one of this year’s winners, has already given Bricker another example.

“The day of the ceremony,” said Bricker, “Winrock International reached out to me wanting [SMART Repro’s] contact information. That’s the kind of national publicity that helps them increase their exporting services.”

For this year’s award ceremony, Bricker decided to honor not only the award winners, but also the years of work by Hutchinson and Secretary of Commerce Mike Preston, inviting them to reflect on their time spent promoting Arkansas as a new hub for international business.

“Whenever Mike came onboard,” Hutchinson said, “I told him and his team that I would take two international trips a year while I’m governor. I believed that could fit in with my management of the state, and it was important to market Arkansas. So, our habit was to go to Asia and then to Europe, and I did that every year except during the pandemic.”

In Asia, Hutchinson mostly sought to recruit industries from China and promote Arkansas goods for the largest consumer market in the world.

“Whenever we started going to China it was a wide-open market. You had every state going there, virtually, recruiting industry. China was looking for investment opportunities in the United States, and from my perspective, it was a matter of moving manufacturing from China here to the United States. So, we recruited some industry, had some success stories, and a couple of them are still here in Arkansas. But the biggest projects went by the wayside, and it was simply a casualty of the trade war. It didn’t go the way I wanted it to.”

Preston said, “[The trade war] slowed things down. We actually worked very closely with the Trump administration. We understood what they were trying to do in terms of the trade war, but we had workarounds for some of our projects. Then the pandemic hit, and all bets were off, and that’s where some of those projects really just fell off. It’s more complicated today than it was when we started.”

While circumstances at the national and global levels made work with China a struggle, Hutchinson and Preston found much greater success in Europe, which has been a major market for Arkansas’s growing aerospace and defense industry.

“We had dabbled previously before this administration in going to air shows [in Europe] and promoting ourselves,” Preston said. “We got there in 2015 for the first time, and it was, ‘Who’s Arkansas and why are you here?’ This last trip we were in Farnborough in 2022, and it was ‘Welcome back, you guys are the leaders.’ We were among the top in the aerospace industry; we really carved out our spot in terms of U.S. states.”

In past years, the categories have included an award each for small, medium, and large exporters. This year, Bricker chose to tailor them to better reflect the export industry’s greatest success stories, replacing size-based categories with those of Women-Owned Exporter, Franchise Development Exporter and Agricultural Exporter awards. He also made an effort to include more regions of the state than just central and northwest Arkansas, as exemplified by SMART Repro in Jonesboro, winner of the Women-Owned Exporter award. Another new addition was the use of pre-recorded acceptance speech videos, which allowed winners to show, rather than just tell, what makes their businesses great.

AWARD WINNERS

Riceland (Stuttgart) –

Agricultural Exporter Award

Founded in 1921, Riceland Foods, Inc. is the world’s largest miller and marketer of rice. A farmer-owned agricultural marketing cooperative, Riceland has over 1,500 employees and operates seven rice mills, including the world’s largest in Jonesboro. It sells products to retailers, food service and food manufacturing companies around the world, including not just rice but also rice bran oil, rice flower, rice bran and hulls for a wide variety of uses from pet food to animal bedding. Though rice dominates the co-op, it is also a major processor of soybeans for the region and handles smaller quantities of wheat and corn, depending on the needs of the farmer members. Riceland’s largest export market is Haiti, and in recent years, it has opened new markets in Jordan and Iceland.

“It’s easy to think of rice as an exotic grain from picturesque foreign lands,” said Jason Bransel, president and CEO of Riceland Foods. “But most of the rice we eat is grown right here. American rice grown on American soil by the American family farmer. We at Riceland help our farmers reach domestic markets and global export markets. We do collectively through the cooperative what our farmers would struggle to do individually.”

Slim Chickens (Fayetteville) –

Franchise Development
Exporter Award

Established in 2003 in a former sushi restaurant, Slim Chickens has rapidly expanded beyond its first location in Fayetteville to become one of the largest foodservice employers in Arkansas with numerous overseas locations. Their first overseas franchise was established in 2017 in Kuwait, and within the past four years, they have expanded to 27 more in the U.K. More franchises are set to open in Turkey, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. The company is developing a strategy to expand further into the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia, with the goal of almost tripling the number of locations to 300 by 2032.

“I could have probably put them in the medium or maybe large category,” Bricker said, “but I don’t think that reflected their accomplishments appropriately.”

Power Technology:
(Alexander) –

Innovation and Impact in
Manufacturing Exporter Award

One of the oldest photonics companies in the United States, Power Technology Inc. produces a comprehensive range of laser products for biomedical, industrial, projection, defense and security applications, among others. Power Technology was one of the earliest winners of the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Global Trade, having previously won in 2011. Over the past two years, it has increased its global market share last year bolstered annual revenue by 30%. Major customers include Israel, the U.K. and South Korea, with recent expansion into Indonesia, Hungary and Uruguay.

“PTI was originally founded to manufacture laser power supplies for helium neon gas lasers,” said William Burgess, company CEO. “In the world of lasers, many industry experts have said this type of laser and its associated power supplies are on the decline. However, the beam quality of these lasers is better than most, and some markets still have a need for them. PTI has successfully grown its market share by identifying these key market segments and targeting our sales efforts on larger customers overseas.”

Virco (Conway) –

Resilience in Manufacturing
Exporter Award

Founded in California in 1950, Virco has expanded to be the leading manufacturer of K-12 school furniture and equipment in the nation, much of which is produced in its 1.75 million-square-foot Conway facility. Virco exports to over 75 countries, led by Canada, Mexico and Caribbean and South American countries. New markets for the company include Vietnam, the Philippines and Saint Martin. Despite mass closures of schools around the world due to the pandemic causing a significant decrease in Virco’s total international sales, the company nevertheless held on to roughly 95% of its employees and has made a strong comeback in terms of exports, thus earning the Resilience in Manufacturing Exporter Award.

“One of the things that we are proudest of is over 40% of our employees have been with Virco for more than 20 years,” said President Doug Virtue. “That degree of loyalty and continuity is unusual for any organization. We believe it is a big reason, probably the main reason, that we have remained globally competitive during these challenging years. I mean it when I say that we’d put our Arkansas team against any company in the world, and we’d come out on top.

White River Hardwoods-
Woodworks (Fayetteville) –

Rising Star Exporter Award

A family-owned business founded in 1975, White River Hardwoods-Woodworks manufactures embellished and traditional hardwood moldings, corbels and architectural wood carvings for the millwork and kitchen and bath industries, as well as provides millwork design services for residential and commercial projects. With 54 highly professional employees, 44 of which are based in Arkansas, White River Hardwoods has been enlisted for many luxury building projects throughout the years, including projects for Disneyland Tokyo. With year-over-year growth since 2019, export sales now account for 12% of the company’s gross revenue. In recent years, the company has transitioned away from distributors and is now doing large-scale projects on its own.

“We carry over 3,200 products in stock,” said company founder and President Joan Johnson, “We can usually ship out a large job within two to three weeks.”

SMART Repro

(Jonesboro) –

Woman Owned

Exporter Award

The first winner of the Woman Owned Exporter Award, SMART Repro was established in 2019 by CEO Brittany Scott as a unique operation in Arkansas agriculture. Short for SMART Reproduction, it is the first company in the United States to achieve European Union and U.K. certifications for the collection, storage and export of frozen sheep and goat semen and embryo. It is also the first company to negotiate multicountry export certification from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As such, it remains the only facility of its kind in the U.S. and has opened the door to previously unavailable global markets for American sheep and goat producers. Its growth has been exponential, and the company’s revenue is now 100% export-based.

“Our products are used in breed-up programs worldwide,” Scott said. “In these programs, we are taking elite American genetics and using them primarily in developing countries to make the native goats better.”