Boyd International Limited

Company name
Boyd International Limited

Business
Seller of Pre-owned Food Machinery

Grad position
International Business Development Assistant
Sales and Marketing Assistant Linguistics
IT Developer

Grad name
Amanda Mair
Dionne Robertson
Sean Hsu

University/College
University of Stirling
Robert Gordon Uni
University of Strathclyde

Degree/Study
International Management Studies with German & Spanish (BA Hons)
European Business Admin with French (BA Hons)
Master (MSC) in ‘Business Information Technology System’

Length of postion
Permanent Position / Ongoing

Boyd International Limited

Boyd Food Machinery, part of Boyd International Limited, exports over 90% of its pre-owned and reconditioned industrial machinery with recent shipments being made to Israel, Australia, Colombia, Malaysia and South Africa. The company also purchase equipment internationally before being refurbished in their specialist workshops in Buckie and then sold on.

During 2007, Boyd Food Machinery employed three graduates in conjunction with the GO! Graduate Scheme, partially funded by HIE Moray. The new members of staff have brought with them skills enabling Boyd Food Machinery to add four new languages to its in-house international communications.

How did GO help?

The graduates…

Amanda Mair, International Business Development
“The two main advantages for me of working at Boyd International; are being close to home as I am very family orientated, and also being able to utilize the skills that I acquired at University on a day to day basis – with languages this is especially important. Boyd International is also quite a young company with great growth and development potential therefore the opportunities for a graduate are endless. Foreign business trips are a further major advantage, for me to practise and gain confidence in both my German and Spanish business conversational skills.”

Dionne Robertson, Sales and Marketing Assistant
“Being able to live at home. This position enables me to live at home and use my degree, putting theory into practice. I also enjoy the small friendly office environment, and a recent trade exhibition in Germany provided me a great opportunity to meet clients face to face.”

Sean Hsu, Linguistics and IT Developer
“Through this job and the GO scheme, I get the opportunity to realise the theory that I’ve learnt at University and develop some international marketing strategies in the Chinese market, in addition to creating a Chinese website and language translation. I feel self-motivated whenever I find some potential suppliers or buyers and I enjoy the work very much.”

The business…

Using the language and IT skills of our graduates we are able to further increase our international customer base as over 90% of our sales are export. It is also important to have the backup from the GO! programme and HIE to provide the graduates with training they require for their post. From previous experience we appreciate that it is extremely important, and much easier, to be able to communicate with our customers in their native language and through our graduates we have been able to bring four new languages to our team, investigate potential international growth market areas for the food industry (India, Pakistan and Iran), develop multi-lingual websites, develop a particular focus on the Chinese and Taiwanese markets and optimise our search engine ranking – all allowing us to reach a wider international audience, to increase export sales.