Big business hopes to be a winner

The world's largest diversified natural resources company is using the Olympics to network with government and business, and reward staff, but it also seeks to woo the world's largest market, a nation of 1.3 billion people with diminishing coal supplies and a desperate need for energy to sustain double-digit growth.

BHP Billiton supplies the 6000 Olympic and Paralympic medals awarded to athletes. It is sponsoring the Chinese women's hockey team and has introduced 8000 children across China to Olympic activities in community programs designed to encourage health and fitness.

Unlike most sponsors, BHP is not a retail store selling buckets of iron ore. It is using the Olympics to increase awareness in a country where it first traded in the 1880s, selling lead. As the director of its Beijing Olympic project, Maria McCarthy, says: "The Games have provided us with a unique opportunity to demonstrate continued support for China's long-term development and its emerging role in the international community."

The president of BHP Billiton in China, Clinton Dines, says China is the company's biggest customer, generating 20 per cent of revenue, and it has a voracious appetite for energy. "Oil, gas, coal and uranium will be big movers in the future."

Dines has been in China for 30 years, selling iron ore, copper concentrates, alumina and nickel. Iron ore is a vexed subject: BHP's planned merger with rival supplier Rio Tinto has prompted unprecedented hostility and China's move to secure a 9 per cent stake in Rio.

BHP undoubtedly hopes its role at the Olympics will help cool such sentiments. But Dines is dismissive of Western paranoia over Chinese takeovers. "China has a big cheque book, but it would be an enormous disservice to Australia economically for a sell-off of a national champion like BHP Billiton or Woodside," he said.

There it is again - "national champion" - the ever present link in Beijing between sport and business.

At the Sofitel Wanda, BHP Billiton inspires its daily parade of representatives from 49,000 staff and 133,000 community members in remote mining districts with the help of such Olympic champions as Peter Vidmar, a dual gold medal-winning gymnast in 1984. Vidmar stands on an upside-down chair delivering his message into a microphone, while the parents of "BHP Billiton's Olympic hero", swimmer Eamon Sullivan, listen.

His underlying message is consistent with McCarthy's: "The ideals that the Olympic movement promotes, such as achievement, integrity and respect, mirror our own set of values which determine the way we do business."

Yet Australian companies often question whether integrity is high on the list of priorities of Chinese businessmen. Many of the Australian service companies who worked on the Atlanta, Sydney and Athens Olympics did not win contracts for the Beijing Games and expressed anger at the process, which involved making a bid, supplying designs and releasing more intellectual property only to receive a final message from Beijing that the Chinese would do the project themselves.

A Sydney architect, John Pauline, who helped design Beijing's futuristic aquatic centre, the Water Cube, with an estimated price tag of $US150 million, admits this was the experience of Australian firms expecting to win contracts to build the rowing and sailing venues.

Pauline's boss, the managing director of PTW, John Bilmon, who is in Beijing checking the company's three projects - the athletes' village, venues within the Olympic hub and the aquatic centre - says learning business the Chinese way took time.

Pauline says, "The Olympic Village project was a contractual roller-coaster. You've got to work in China the Chinese way."

Basically, the Chinese believe a contract can always be negotiated. "They've been doing it that way for 5000 years," one Melbourne businessman says. "Who's to say that our way of sticking to the fine print of the contract is the best way?"

PTW designed the Sydney Aquatic Centre in a joint venture with Cox Architects and was invited to bid in competition with eight international architecture firms, with a design budget of $US100 million. It conceived of the Water Cube in Sydney and had it built by the Sydney engineers, Arup. "We had six Australian and three Chinese architects, together with six to eight engineers working in Sydney," Pauline says. "We won the competition for the bid in 2003 and I moved to China the following year and construction started. We won the Olympic Village competition six months later.

"The Chinese Government will never reveal the final construction cost," Pauline says of the Water Cube, while pointing out that all the funding came from donations by overseas Chinese, including a $25 million donation by a Hong Kong businessman.

"After the Games, the building will be gutted, one pool retained, and refitted with shops to make it commercially viable."

Other Australian construction firms are busy in China, with AusTrade using the third floor of the Hilton Hotel during the Olympics to promote Australian business.

"About 40 Australian firms, ranging from small firms installing sprinklers and smoke detectors in buildings, to BHP Billiton, are involved in the Games," Pauline says.

As the "official diversified minerals and medals sponsor of the Games", BHP Billiton has already won over the Chinese Olympic Committee, which has been proudly presenting medals to its top-of-the-table medal-winning nation.

The company's Cannington mine in Queensland and its Escondida and Spence operations in Chile provided the materials necessary to produce the gold, silver and bronze medals. The materials were shipped from both countries to the Shanghai mint, where the medals were created.

But BHP Billiton's greatest gift may be to its workers, 200 of whom have been rewarded for safety or community initiatives. Frank Moffati, a worker at the Cannington plant, is taking 11 members of his family to the Paralympics, which begin next month, to watch his son Ricardo, a swimmer.

"I'm digging the material that my son is going over there to win," Moffati says, reflecting the pride that links the Olympics with business.