San Francisco Will Host High-Powered Asian Trade Conference : Import-export: Several heads of state will join 500 U.S. executives, giving them a chance to network with others engaged in Pacific Rim trade.

With consumer markets in Asia about to become far larger than the North American market, heads-up companies should heed this sea change and adjust their strategies accordingly.

That is the theme of PacRim 90, a high-powered international trade and finance forum that begins a four-day stand at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco next Sunday.

“The shift from low-wage, export-driven economies to higher-income, consumer-driven economies (in Asia) offers enormous opportunities for U.S. companies,” said William C. Grindley, a consultant with Pacific Strategies in Atherton, Calif., who helped assemble speakers for the event.

“If they don’t take advantage of them, Japanese or other Asian companies certainly will.”

Grindley projects that trade volume among Asian countries will catch up to transpacific trade this year or next for the first time, reaching about $315 billion. In the next few years, he added, trade within Asia is expected to grow 20% to 30% a year, compared to about 6% for transpacific activity.

Attending the forum will be about 500 senior executives of large and medium-size companies based in several nations, with each participant shelling out a hefty $2,400 to help defray the event’s $3-million cost. The number of participants is down from the organizers’ original expectation of 750.

The conference is being organized by EventsCorp Australia, an entity of the state government of Western Australia with headquarters in Perth.

This is the first of the group’s PacRim meetings to be held on the eastern side of the Pacific. Previous sessions were held in Hong Kong in February, 1989, and in Perth, Australia, in October, 1986.

A key benefit for participants will be a chance to network with other companies engaged in Pacific Rim trade, said conference chairman John Osborn, on a recent visit from Perth to PacRim 90’s San Francisco headquarters, in some law offices recently vacated by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.

Organizers have their fingers crossed that President Bush, who is scheduled to be in San Francisco Sept. 12 for a fund-raiser for Sen. Pete Wilson’s gubernatorial campaign, will be the closing speaker that day for the PacRim forum. But the White House has not confirmed his appearance.

Sessions are expected to include speeches over satellite hookups by Prime Ministers Robert Hawke of Australia, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, Mahathir Mohammed of Malaysia and Chatichai Choonhavan of Thailand.

Among other participants will be Hideo Ishihara, deputy president of the Industrial Bank of Japan; Kenichi Ohmae, chairman of McKinsey & Co. of Japan; C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics; Richard Solomon, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs; David K. P. Li, director and chief executive of the bank of East Asia in Hong Kong, and, from the Soviet Union, Stephan A. Sitaryan, deputy prime minister and head of the Foreign Economic Commission.

The forum’s four major sponsors are Arthur Andersen Worldwide Organization, AT&T;, McKinsey & Co., a big management consulting firm, and Morrison & Foerster, a San Francisco-based law firm. Several other companies, including Chevron, Bechtel, UPS, Apple Computer and Bank of America, are also contributing.

Conference sessions will cover:

* The changing nature of Pacific Rim economies, with emphasis on the exploding growth in trade among Asian nations and what that will mean for the United States.

* Independent and cooperative ventures between Japan and the United States.

* Asian consumers.

* Finance trends in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

* California’s role as a Pacific Rim trade partner and a laboratory for new ideas.

* China’s economic evolution.

* Opportunities for companies involved in building or repairing infrastructure.

* “Exotic opportunities” for trade with Latin America, Soviet Asia and Vietnam.

* How the rise in oil prices will affect Pacific Rim economies and U.S. and Japanese investments in Pacific Rim nations, a session hastily added to deal with fallout from Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait.