DATE: Saturday, October 25, 1997            TAG: 9710250645

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY AKWELI PARKER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: HAMPTON                           LENGTH:   36 lines

AEROSPACE DEAL LINKS FIRMS FROM HAMPTON AND JAPAN

Many companies in the West drool at the prospect of doing business in the Pacific Rim, a relatively untouched profit feast for those lucky or smart enough to get a seat at the table.

Hampton-based SpaceTec Inc. is already pouring the saki.

It recently reached an agreement with Marubeni Corp. - one of Japan's largest trading companies - to jointly pursue aerospace projects.

Marubeni's considerable muscle will be crucial in helping 45-employee SpaceTec crack the promising but idiosyncratic Asian market.

``We found that in order to do business in other parts of the world, you really need a local partner,'' said Martin Kaszubowski, SpaceTec's director of business development.

``There's a lot of good technology and a lot of good money to be made in the Far East,'' said Kaszubowski. But ``a lot of big companies have arrogantly gone off into other parts of the world alone'' and taken a bath because they didn't understand local culture and ways of doing business, he said.

Kaszubowski said the two companies are considering work contracts and that any near-term projects will probably ``start out small.''

SpaceTec acts as a concierge for space-faring companies, handling the big and small details of putting payloads into space. Earlier this year the company inked a deal with United Space Alliance to increase the number of commercial payloads on the space shuttle. The company has similar agreements in European commercial space markets.

In the United States alone, the commercial satellite business is a $6 billion a year industry, according to the National Space Society.

Marubeni is a Tokyo-based trading conglomerate with operations in metals, minerals, textiles, machinery, food, chemicals and more, employing 9,300 workers in 84 countries.

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