April 3, 1996

IT'S NOT ALL BEER AND SKITTLES

Eric Ellis, Phnom Penh

DODGING sniper fire or paying off bandits is part of everyday life in Cambodia for Australian businessman John Harper. Eric Ellis in Phnom Penh reports on how Mr Harper has built up his business.

IT'S not every day one has to dodge Khmer Rouge sniper fire or pay off bandits to get a shipment through.

But then John Harper's not operating in a regular marketplace. Cambodia not only requires nerves of steel to make a quid, it requires a fair bit of actual steel, in the shape of an armed guard.

But Mr Harper, the chairman of United Distributors Cambodia doesn't see anything particularly unusual in how he earns a living.

He's been doing it in Cambodia since 1988 and he'll continue for the foreseeable future.

"This place is a real Cinderella," said Mr Harper, originally from Melbourne. He has been running around Asian markets for 25 years.

With Australian Embassy support, Mr Harper has just convened the first Australian business group in Phnom Penh, the Australian Business Association of Cambodia.

It includes such pioneering companies as Kinhill Consultants, Snowy Mountains Engineering, Telstra and Henry Walker, most of whom have aid-related deals in Cambodia.

Mr Harper's operation employs 400 in Cambodia - "the largest employer outside the army"' he quips -- and distributes mostly Australian food products to outlets across Cambodia, directly and through the vast network of Chinese-Khmer sub-agents.

When tourists make a day of exploring the Angkor Wat temple complex 300 kilometres north-east of Phnom Penh, the chances are it is Harper's group that has brought in the hearty breakfast that sustains them.

"I reckon we'd supply 90 per cent of the output in Cambodia's hotels," he said.

Mr Harper also helped set up modern Cambodia's first brewery, which makes Angkor Beer. In fact, it was beer that got him to Cambodia in the first place.

After his family sold the Melbourne-based James Chocolates group in the 1960s, Mr Harper teed up with a brewing group that sold Australian malts to Asian breweries.

That originally took him to Vietnam where he set up a brewery in Nha Trang, which was later sold to the Filipino San Miguel group.

"I'd heard of this operation down in Sihanoukville (on Cambodia's southern Gulf of Thailand coast) and I went down to check it out," he said.

This was dangerous territory. It was on the Phnom Penh-Sihanoukville road from where several Western travellers were kidnapped and later killed by Khmer Rouge bandits.

The brewery was an old French operation that had gone to seed. Mr Harper went to France, sourced the old plans and got permission directly from Cambodia's King Sihanouk to re-start the plant.

The beer was launched in 1992 and today is Cambodia's favourite tipple.

He has sold much of his interest to a Malaysian player but he still keeps a close eye on the operation.

The main game is the distribution operation, which he said had been doubling in size every year since Cambodia re-entered the world through the 1991 Paris Peace Plan and subsequent UN-sponsored elections.

"We are bringing in 12-15 containers of product every month and I reckon we could do that again easy," he said.