Unlisted seafood restaurant chain Ocean Basket is one South African firm that appears to be unshaken by events in Greece - and before that, Cyprus - where it is still intent on expanding. Business Times asks Ocean Basket's head of international business, Kobus Meyburgh ... What's happened to business over the past six months?In December 2014, we opened the store in Glyfada [in Athens]. It is more of a holiday suburb - quite affluent, and we purposefully chose a site slightly off the main street. We wanted to get into the Greek market cautiously, and not necessarily on a high-street location. This one store has been trading very well. We have seen about a 25% decrease in foot count, but we still serve more than 6000 customers a month.At the moment, we'd be quite cautious, but our intent is to expand. We are looking at second and third locations.story_article_left1Why did you want to expand into Greece in the first place, given the challenges there?It's partly due to our roots - our founders are Greek [brothers Peter and George Lazaridis, and two other partners]. The Cyprus operations, where we've got seven stores, have had lots of Greek visitors, so the invitation's always been there to establish in Greece.What about the freeze on the banks - how's that affecting your supplier payments?The one big concern is that the cash that is in circulation is limited to the amount of euros that people can withdraw, and that obviously makes a big difference as to how much they would consider spending in the store. Our intent has always been to provide exceptional value, so if someone feels that they've only got à 10 [about R130] to spend, then can we give them a fantastic seafood offering for that .Understandably, people re-look at how much they're spending. Also, some of the bailout conditions are VAT changes - to 23% for restaurants [from 18% now] - which also disincentivises someone to go out.But even with this, we could probably have expected a worse drop-off. So if someone has priced excessively from the beginning, they're probably going to bear more of the brunt of fewer consumers going there.We've seen that in Cyprus - when they went through a crisis, after the first dip, they actually exceeded expectations. We took more customers from more expensive restaurants, so we do see it as an opportunity.In terms of payments to our suppliers, because it's a joint venture we supply our stock via Cyprus, which is just around the corner, so as a cash-based business it's quite easy to manage that. They would only order what they know they can sell and afford, so we're not gearing the business.Have you seen any drop-off in tourism?I understand from our store that there's still lots of activity around Glyfada. The mood is a bit muted but it seems almost as if this holiday side of Glyfada is slightly buffered. People are more affluent and would seem to be not as concerned as someone who earns a minimum wage.story_article_right2What lessons did Ocean Basket learn operating through Cyprus's financial crisis?If you take a long-term view and you ride the storm, you know that there's always value available. If you focus on people and make sure you give them an exceptional product, there's reason to survive. And you can buy loyalty during a crisis. So I think that is the philosophical value of having gone through one crisis - it toughens you up and you know how to market appropriately.What was the expansion plan in Greece, before the events of the past couple of weeks?Typically when we enter a new territory, we would join up in a master licence agreement with someone who would commit to a number of stores, but because we did a joint venture, and it's partly company owned, we did not do that in Greece. We think the market could be four stores ... we started off with the intent of having four stores in Cyprus and then it ended at seven and we're establishing the next one now. We're following the same approach on Greece.How many stores does Ocean Basket now have, worldwide?We have 168 locally, and internationally 24 stores. Last week we opened in Malta, we opened one store in Egypt this week and another in Nigeria, also this week ... and if things work as planned we should end up with 37 [international] stores by ... May 2016.Would you ever list on the JSE?At the moment there's no intent to list. We feel that we want to stay in control of the business, we think we've got a fantastic offering, we think the world really is our oyster. We get three or four inquiries for master licences almost daily, so we know that we can still build lots of equity into the business.Talevi is a BDTV presenter..