Audentes fortuna juvat. [Lat.] Fortune favors the bold.
Credent Star, Inc. Comprador Services
Credent Star, Inc. represents strategic partner horizontal market suppliers in over 50 different business supply-sector categories ranging from office supplies to IT, logistics to telephony, accounting to finance, energy to insurance, payroll to merchant services, and government to private funding. Through timely application of these professional relationships, Credent Star, Inc. bridges the relational gap between client and sector supplier, thus substantially reducing client operating costs and strengthening client bottom line while maintaining high product and service quality. This relieves both the client company and the strategic partner from the need for substantial additional sales, and the high personnel and material costs associated with such sales efforts. And, as a contingent-fee business, our service adds zero cost to our clients’ bottom line. As stated previously, if we don’t produce, we don’t get paid.
What’s In a Name?
In this case, everything. Derived from the Latin word comparare, which means to procure, the term Comprador is an archaic Portuguese word that means buyer, negotiator, or intermediary. In 17th century China, during the beginning of the Manchu dynasty and the reign of the emperor Ch’ung Ch’en, international trade exploded between China and the British Empire, Europe and America. To protect China from foreign cultural influence, the emperor decreed that all foreigners doing business with China had to be confined to a walled area of Canton by the sea that contained the docks and warehouses. Guards were posted day and night, and any foreigner who ventured beyond the wall was immediately subject to death. As such, any and all dealings with China had to be through native Chinese. Thus the term Comprador came to be defined as the title for a Chinese agent engaged by a foreign business house or Hong to act as an intermediary in its business affairs with the Middle Kingdom.
Who, What, When, Where?
Compradors were typically men of high standing in their native communities: important bankers, successful businessmen, and large-scale property owners. These were men who knew the crucial importance of Who, What, When and Where: who needed what, what was possible and what was not, when rules could be bent and when rules could be broken, where profit could be had and where imperial sanction could be avoided. As such, Compradors had crucial relationships with these foreign Hongs, brokering the critical business relationships required to provide the tea, silk, cotton, camphorwood, porcelain and dozens of other goods critical to maintaining the burgeoning international trade. Historically notable Compradors during this period include Zhang Jiaao of the great trading city of Shanghai, and Tong King-Sing of the important commercial province of Guangdong. And it is believed that the famous Robert Hotung, Comprador of the leading British trading conglomerate Jardine, Matheson & Company, ultimately became the richest man in Hong Kong. Of course, in later years a Marxist movement that despised individual initiative and the entrepreneurial spirit re-coined the phrase as Comprador Bourgeoisie, which logically gave the title additional panache in the capitalist world.
How About Today?
In the business world of today, the term Comprador is applicable to many fields of endeavor, where it denotes an intermediary assisting two or more diverse organizations through mutually advantageous business relationships built on the ageless business principle of who needs what delivered where and when at the most advantageous price. The French have long had a name for such professionals: Homme d’affaires, meaning an agent or middleman. In the software and IT industries, individuals who possess these timeless Comprador qualities have earned the sobriquet Dot.Compradors. In the legal and accounting professions, the title means rainmaker. In the investment, venture capital, and merger and acquisition industries, it stands for deal flow specialist. And as it applies to Credent Star, Inc., Comprador equals business relationship specialist, focusing on the additional benefit of a shared Christian belief system between our clients and strategic partners.
“Instead, there must be a spiritual renewal of your thoughts and attitudes. You must display a new nature because you are a new person, created in God’s likeness – righteous, holy, and true.” Ephesians 4:23-24.