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President Obama talks about reviving the nation’s economy by focusing on exports, the majority of which are sent by cargo ship. Surprisingly, the US state that, by one measure, leads the country in exports is a land-locked state with no major port access. The World’s Jason Margolis takes us to Kansas. (Photo: Jason Margolis)
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. The economy is expanding. But the pace of growth has slowed down. New Commerce Department figures show the US economy growing 2.4% during the second quarter this year. That’s down by more than one percentage point from the previous quarter. One factor that’s holding back US growth is a surge in imports. As a nation, we keep buying more foreign goods than those we export to other nations. One state has figured out how to buck this trend, however. The World’s Jason Margolis takes us there.
JASON MARGOLIS: If you look at a US map, smack-dab in the middle sits the state of Kansas. Now, consider this. 99% of cargo leaving the US goes out by ship. But Kansas has no major ports. The largest nearby river port is in Kansas City, Missouri and is only the 91st biggest port in the country. So when the U.S. Department of Commerce said that Kansas was by one measure the top state for manufacturing exports, this raised some eyebrows. But not for people in Kansas.
JIM WOLFF: Not a surprise to me.
MARGOLIS: Jim Wolff is a professor in the management department at Wichita State University.
WOLFF: Kansas is an agricultural state. Much of the wheat and agricultural products are prime candidates for export. And in South Central Kansas, we have a huge hub, a cluster of aircraft manufacturing.
MARGOLIS: Wichita is to plane building, what Detroit is to autos. Cessna, Learjet, and Hawker Beechcraft are all based in Wichita. Delivering a customized plane to an overseas customer from landlocked Kansas. No big deal, says Tom Aniello with Cessna.
TOM ANIELLO: We fly everything. You don’t have to ship it anywhere, you fly it.
MARGOLIS: Ten years ago, Cessna sold about 75% of its planes domestically and a quarter abroad. Today it’s the reverse. Aniello says a weaker dollar made Cessna’s planes more affordable overseas. And new foreign markets have opened up.
ANIELLO: We have our aircraft in Japan, Australia, Vietnam, we’ve got quite a few in Egypt, and all throughout the Middle East.
MARGOLIS: Last year in the US, private aircraft became a symbol of corporate excess when auto executives from Detroit came to Washington on private jets, hat in hand asking for money. No American company wanted to be seen near a private jet after that. It was a PR fiasco. And domestic sales dried up. So, Cessna had to lean especially hard on its international customers. Aniello says companies overseas didn’t have to fight off the image of business jets solely as luxury items. Stories like Cessna help explain how the state of Kansas has evolved into a successful exporter. But Kansas’ exports are driven by more than just a few big companies and agriculture. Dharma Desilva, the president of Wichita’s World Trade Council says they’ve worked hard to teach small Kansas businesses the importance of looking well beyond Kansas.
DHARMA DESILVA: 95% of the world population, the middle class, is now outside the United States. That’s where the markets are.
MARGOLIS: One of the success stories he points to is Pioneer Balloons. At a factory just outside of Wichita, a machine inflates a balloon every other second, then stamps a message on the side that says “Happy Birthday.” You have to inflate the balloon to get all the artwork on there. Then, the balloon is deflated and put in a package. The balloons won’t just say Happy Birthday. They’ll also say, Feliz Cumpleanos or, pardon my accent, Joyeux Anniversaire.
TED J. VLAMIS: We print balloons in about 10 or 15 different languages.
MARGOLIS: Ted J. Vlamis is second in command at Pioneer Balloons. His parents founded the company. When he started in the balloon business almost three decades ago, only 1% of sales went abroad. Today he says more than a third of the balloons here will head overseas.
VLAMIS: We picked up a customer last year in Angola, which is not something that you would expect.
MARGOLIS: As Pioneer Balloons has expanded from small mom and pop operation to international exporter, Vlamis says they were confident that Kansas was the right place to make the transition.
VLAMIS: We are landlocked, however, if we were on the west coast, it would be very good for shipping to Asia. If we were on the east coast, it would be very good for shipping to Europe. So we kind of get a medium ground that allows us to ship to a lot of different places.
MARGOLIS: And, Vlamis says, balloons are really light. So shipping orders halfway around the world, even to places like Angola, isn’t a big issue. In the age of Fed Ex, UPS, and DHL, if you’re sending balloons from Kansas, who needs a big port? For the World, I’m Jason Margolis, Wichita, Kansas.
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