Valley companies seeking opportunities in Beijing. (Up Front).

Keith Dabney, founder and president of North Hollywood-based Pretty Pictures, is about to embark on a mission that, to date, most smaller San Fernando Valley-based companies have shied away from: partnering with businesses in China.

Pretty Pictures, a three-year-old company with only four employees, produces personal training, corporate and instructional videos.

Dabney was one of about 300 business owners who attended the Southern California International Trade Conference Nov. 15 at the Universal Hilton Hotel. He'd heard there might be some serious talk there about how to do business in Asia, particularly Beijing, and what opportunities there may be for him in the days leading up to that city's 2008 Olympic Games.

Dabney is also interested in partnering with an Asian-based company that could package his video products. So, he's hoping to get in on pre-game opportunities for business as a way of cracking the Asian market, starting with China, where the fastest economic growth on the entire continent is expected to take place over the next five years.

"Packaging costs can be cheaper there, depending on the production, but it's also about moving beyond the borders," said Dabney.

As it turns out, the "Doing Business in Asia" workshop he attended at the conference, and subsequent announcements about joint economic development plans between Beijing and Los Angeles, would do more to take the mystery and some of the red tape out of going global than Dabney ever thought he'd get for his $75 registration fee.

Hahn and Beijing Mayor Liu Qi signed an agreement Nov. 20 establishing trade offices in Los Angeles and Beijing to enhance business opportunities between the two cities, not just in the days leading up to the 2008 games, but well beyond.

Dabney's got something else going for him: he's a former CBS producer who worked on both the 1992 summer games in Barcelona and the 1994 winter games in Lillehammer.

Over the next year, he expects to seek out potential partners while simultaneously promoting his services to Olympic organizers who are expected to provide opportunities for roughly $23 billion worth of business.

As China's middle-class population continues to swell, so does the country's need to embrace foreign brands, particularly what many trade conference attendees and panelists identified as perhaps the best-known brand in the world: Los Angeles.

China's GDP in 1980 was just $168 billion. By 2000 the figure had soared to $727 billion. Meanwhile, foreign investment in China went from $1 billion in 1980 to $4.7 billion in 2000 and is expected to hit $6 billion by late 2003.

"There is no question that the Valley and the region as a whole, in terms of products and services Beijing may need, has a clear advantage," said Vance Baugham, head of the Port of Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley Trade Office."