A creative industries delegation from Wales has flown out to Mexico to cement a growing relationship between the two countries and lay the foundations for an official Memorandum of Understanding to create reciprocal business opportunities.
The Welsh Government knowledge transfer mission (Oct 11-19 ), coordinated by content marketing agency Culture Group Ltd, which has offices in Cardiff and Mexico, follows recent visits to Wales from Ministers of the Mexican state of Jalisco and the Mexican Ambassador to the UK.
Jalisco’s Minister of Innovation was in Cardiff in March and the Minister of Economic Development in July, for meetings with Economy Minister Edwina Hart and officials. The Minister for Economic Development also visited the Wales Games Development Show and met with a number of companies from Cardiff’s fast-growing games cluster.
Discussions centred on partnership opportunities between Mexico and Wales with an initial focus on creative industries. The visit this month will advance plans for an MoU between Wales and Jalisco set to be signed early next year.
The mission to Mexico has been scheduled to coincide with the GREAT week – part of the UKTI’s GREAT Britain campaign to promote the UK internationally, highlighting areas of British expertise such as: technology, innovation, culture, sport, legacy, music, sustainability, creativity and entrepreneurship
The delegation – which includes ‘ambassadors’ representing a range of sectors within creative industries – will visit Mexico City (the focus of the GREAT week) and Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco, where they will be hosted by the Jalisco Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology, Jamie Reyes.
Economy Minister Edwina Hart said:” Wales is leading the way in creating long term trade opportunities by linking up specific sectors with high growth and emerging markets.
“The delegation will support and cement the growing relationship between Wales and the State of Jalisco, help raise the profile of the sector in Mexico and generate trade and collaboration opportunities.”
A series of meetings and activities have been arranged by Culture Group to explore future business opportunities, examine the sector strengths, understand the Mexican market and identify areas for collaboration. The knowledge and information gained will be evaluated and collated into wider resources to help support Welsh businesses to enter new markets and to understand how to take advantage of future missions.
The visit will also open up opportunities for 2015 which is designated Year of the UK in Mexico and Mexico in the UK that aims to double the trade between the two countries.
A similar Welsh Government Mission to Mexico last year brought results for Cardiff based brand development agency Blue Stag.
Dan Sargent, Creative Director said: “Our Director of Tech was on the mission which allowed us to bring new skills into the business that meant we were able to deliver some exciting new formats of animation work for one of our UK charity clients. We delivered this working in partnership with a Mexican team and wouldn’t have been able to do that sort of work before.
“The client was really pleased with the results and we had some great media exposure from the trip, which we were able to use to make connections across the rest of North America, including one with Google’s main developer team in Mountain View.”
Mexico is one of the featured markets at Explore Export event in Cardiff in November and the WG is leading a multi-sector trade mission to Mexico in January 2015.