BEIJING - It's hard to go around a city in China and not see the familiar face of Corbin's Harlan Sanders, the Colonel, smiling down upon you and the millions of Chinese that populate the nation's commercial hubs. Another regular sight in the nation of 1.3 billion is a valiant horse, either as a statue mounted by a war hero in a town square or iconized in jade at a retailer.
It is those two images that have established China's familiarity with Kentucky and made it an easy pitch for Nicholasville-based Alltech's Asia Pacific marketing manager Roland Matyasi to help introduce the bioscience company's Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale to Shanghai and Beijing.
"Every Chinese person knows Kentucky means horses and KFC," he said.
While focusing on the company's main products in the world of Chinese agriculture, Alltech introduced Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale, emblazoned with a horse on its logo, as a high-end, niche product in October.
While the Commerce Lexington China trip was in Beijing, the company's first full shipment of the beer - brewed and then aged inside spent bourbon casks inside Lexington's New Circle Road - was in transit to be sold at the wholesale rate of $6 a bottle in some of the highest end establishments in these two world-class cities.
"Whatever we do, we always link it back to Kentucky," Matyasi said in an interview with Business Lexington in Beijing. "That's good for us, but it is good for the state as well. In China, Kentucky means a lot. They don't know where it is, they've probably never been, but they know it (and) they know horses."
The product was first sampled in China last year during a series of entrepreneurial events in the two cities featuring Alltech's founder and CEO Pearse Lyons and former Kentucky governor and businessman John Y. Brown.
Matyasi said the few cases of Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale that Lyons brought over in 2010 were so popular and garnered so many offers to distribute in the region, Alltech had no choice but to introduce the product to the horse clubs and other establishments where the well-to-do congregate to partake in one of the most expensive beers for sale in China.
Though the introduction of their award-winning beer may have made a splash back in central Kentucky, the vast majority of Alltech's 200-plus employees in their four Chinese offices are focusing on growing their agriculture business and establishing local production.
Matyasi, a native of Hungary, formerly worked in Alltech's Europe operations before accepting assignment in the Chinese capital in 2010. He said he and Alltech's other employees in China are schooled on forgetting what they know about how to do business where they came from.
"Western companies, ... they think they were successful back in their countries, (and they will) just follow the same ways of doing business they do at home, and the market is huge here, so it easy. It's not. Eventually you go back to your country without any money. You lose your money here if you want to do your business the same way you do it back home," he said.
Matyasi referred to a 10-point key to doing business that Lyons put together for the Chinese operation.