Isikeli Taureka: A Global Corporate Star

Isikeli Taureka: A Global Corporate Star

[This story is worth more than the time taken to read it. How a PNG man can rise up and be a star in the corporate world is amazing. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of Isikeli Taureka before. But I'm glad I did just moments ago. Young Papua New Guineans need stories like this. Ganjiki]

By Rowan Callick, 2009, Islands Business

People from the Pacific have made their mark all over the world.
They have mostly excelled in the world of sport—as rugby players, golfers and wrestlers.
Despite the obsession with politics in the region, few Pacific politicians have become known outside the region at all, or have made a mark beyond their own islands.
The same can be said for business. Even though business is now increasingly global, the region has developed too few stars—people who have truly excelled, either as entrepreneurs or as movers and shakers, in big corporations. 
This is the sphere, though, where the region's future lies—with the private sector that creates jobs and wealth.
In a year in which big questions have been asked about where the global economy is heading, it is appropriate that ISLANDS BUSINESS has decided to award its coveted Pacific Person of the Year award to one of those rare business heroes to have emerged from the islands as an international corporate champion.

BUSINESS GIANT

Few have excelled in that world as gloriously as Isikeli Taureka—the son of a famous Papua New Guinean politician father, and of a much loved Fijian mother. 
He has become a business giant in the highly competitive energy world of China. That he has scored such success in China underlines the importance of this award. 
The future of the Pacific depends heavily on the region's capacity to build businesses and thus wealth that creates jobs rather than build government activities that just spend it.
Taureka is a wonderful model, an example of an islander who has reached a senior level in a highly competitive global industry, based on talent and hard work alone. 
As Chevron's country manager for China, he has won a massive prize—winning a tender to develop a 2,000 sq km gas field in mountainous Sichuan province in a US$2 billion joint venture with local partner PetroChina, against determined global competition.
There are Papua New Guineans in some surprising places around the world, including for instance Granger Narara, who was the chief training pilot for Emirates Airline and is now the vice-president for flight operations at Etihad Airways. 
But Taureka is the first to have succeeded in such a high profile corporate position.
"This is the big league," he said.

His father, Sir Reuben Taureka, is a doctor who trained in Fiji and met his mother there. Hence his Fijian first name. They married and she came to live in PNG.
Sir Reuben later became a trade union leader, and entered parliament with Sir Michael Somare's Pangu Party—claiming credit for introducing to PNG its new nationalist political uniform, the sulu, which he had seen worn so much in Fiji.

Isikeli—usually "Keli"—Taureka graduated in economics from the University of PNG in 1976 and joined the Bank of South Pacific, then owned by the National Australia Bank (NAB). He worked for some time with NAB in Melbourne before becoming an accountant, then a manager of Port Moresby branches.
He worked with the bank for 12 years, including five as deputy managing director of the joint venture Resource Investment Finance Ltd—during which he helped finance the first airline owned by a PNG national, pilot Nat Koleala, from Enga in the Highlands.

Then, he says, "I decided I had had enough of banking. The capital market wasn't very complex and it wasn't exciting any more". 
His time-out which followed, fishing and playing golf, was interrupted by a call from a staffer of the then Prime Minister, Sir Rabbie Namaliu.
He told his wife Joan—a close friend of Sir Rabbie's wife Margaret Nakikus, who later died tragically young—grabbed a tie, headed for the PM's office, and soon discovered his new challenge, taking over as managing director of the imploding state-owned monopoly telco, Post and Telecommunication Corp.

THE VISION

"I went into the office the next day. It was in chaos. We managed to stabilise it, then brought back in some of the experienced staff who had fled. 
"Corporatisation was the flavour of the day, and we started that process with a lot of help from Telstra in Australia and from New Zealand Telecom.
"I learned how people can rise to such occasions." But then a new prime minister wanted to give the telecommunications licence to a Singapore firm for just  Kina 10,000." 
Taureka arranged an independent review that was somewhat critical of such proposals, and when he delivered it, he was shown the door.
As ever in PNG, "politics interfered in what should have been a smooth transition to corporatisation," Taureka says. 
"Telecommunications was among the country's crown jewels. I tried to slash costs and introduce greater accountability, but the unions objected. 
"The vision of enabling grassroots people to communicate, was lost. The country couldn't progress while calls were costing more than a kina a minute."
But he is delighted that private competition has recently, finally, arrived, increasing access and choice and slashing prices. 
"Now there's competition in the mobile market and it has turned the country upside down. But there are still no funds earmarked to provide cheap communications for villagers."
In those years before constitutional change held MPs to party loyalties, there was constant churning at the top. 
Sir Julius Chan reappointed Taureka when he returned to the prime ministership and he served out the rest of his original contract and left.

GLOBAL EXECUTIVE

His new life as a global executive was about to begin. It was 1995.
Chevron, which owned extensive oil fields and prospects in PNG's Highlands, took a strong interest in him and he was headhunted. 
When Taureka expressed concern that he knew nothing about the industry, the company said it would teach him.
"That was one of the luckiest breaks in my life—to be employed by a great company"—in fact the world's sixth biggest.
During his learning curve, he was placed in charge of finance, human resources, government relations and public affairs.
Chevron liked what it saw of him in PNG and swiftly shifted him to San Ramon in northern California, its global HQ. 
There, he became the planning manager for international exploration and production, and facilitated top management meetings.
The company viewed this as a "development assignment" for Taureka, he says. 
"It was a plunge into the real world of big business. I saw how companies are run, the processes and people and behaviour required to achieve outstanding results—things you don't get to see in PNG.
"Compared with my previous business experience, it was like night and day." 
He thought, during his two years there, that he would learn about the business more broadly and then be assigned back to PNG for good.
"It didn't dawn on me that this would actually trigger an international career."

Taureka did return briefly to PNG, but also looked after Chevron's West Australian operations on Barrow Island. 
In 2002 he became a Bangkok-based managing director, looking after operations in Thailand, Cambodia and Bangladesh—reorganising things to confront steep production declines.
In 2005, Chevron acquired fellow California-based Unocal, whose Thai assets were its most important—and Taureka smoothed their transition into the Chevron fold.
When the Chevron chief in China retired in mid-2006, Taureka replaced him and was able to hit the ground running as he had been working for sometime on regional strategy, formulated around gas and oil opportunities—a new direction for a vast country in which Chevron was not then an operator.
He says: "We were in a head-to-head bid for the acquisition of Unocal with China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), with which we had two joint venture offshore oil operations, so I went to China with some trepidation. But I now enjoy close relations with my CNOOC counterparts."
Shortly after Taureka's arrival in China, he led the team that won the tender to develop, with PetroChina, the Chuandongbei "sour gas" fields in mountainous Sichuan in the south-west—the largest foreign involvement in the Chinese oil and gas industry. 

The government had insisted on the introduction of a foreign operator after an uncontrolled release of sour gas resulted in 200 deaths and forced 5,000 people from their homes.
"It's an amazing project for us. We developed a plan and won the tender in less than six months. 
"That's almost the speed of light. Petrochina wanted to expedite it too, because of the strong pressure for increased energy supply in China."
Taureka was able to call on the best resources the company had to offer, from everywhere in the Chevron world including the head office, and the company won the contract for 49 percent of the project, which covers 2,000 sq km and involves 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. 
Now, wells have been drilled, reserves proven, funding arranged and the project is in full construction mode.
"We did not think we could do anything in China," he says, because of the potential resentment over the withdrawal of CNOOC's bid for Unocal in the face of political opposition in the US.
"But the Chinese are pretty practical people and they appreciated our experience in handling sour gas. We have had to prove ourselves, though. It's not just 'ganbei' (the Chinese toast at banquets). We have taken a very consultative approach. 
"We hope to grow in China through opportunities where we can offer technical advantages and also seek to work with our Chinese partners in the international arena."

DEALING WITH CHINESE

Today, based in a massive office tower in the heart of Beijing's central business district, he heads a fast-growing operational business with about 200 staff there and in Tanggu, Shekou and Sichuan.
Taureka says that being a Papua New Guinean "provides a degree of comfort when I'm dealing with our Chinese counterparts coming from this Asia-Pacific region.
"When I walk in the door, they tend to think I'm South African or American. When I say I'm Papua New Guinean, things loosen up quickly. 
"People in the resources industry know the country. Chevron also employs a number of Papua New Guineans working in other parts of the world, including in Lagos and Bangkok and Houston.
"The company helped Petrochina drill its first well overseas, in Kikori in PNG, and such links go a long way.  
"PetroChina's PNG manager then is now president of CNPC, PetroChina's parent company, and I recently took him to see our deep-water operations in the Gulf of Mexico."
"It's been quite an exciting ride," Taureka says. 

He remains a PNG citizen. But he has become very interested in China and is building an awareness within Chevron of the possibilities of doing business there "across the value chain."
The company already supplies liquefied natural gas to China out of Australia's North West Shelf.
Taureka loves the energy industry. "There's nothing like it. The numbers are much bigger than most other industries. It's strategic, it's political."
He has now recruited six top Chinese graduates, "building home-grown talent" as he was himself once groomed in PNG—where he still has aims of returning, one day, to contribute again.