Globalisation and what we need to do now

Another week another country

The impact of reduced tariffs and Free Trade Areas (FTAs) has led to companies going Global for about 10 plus years now. AFTA (American Free Trade Area, between US, Canada and Mexico), EU, ASEAN, Commonwealth etc. have led to increased imports and goods, from components, semi assembled to move from country to country in the attempt to find the cheapest low cost manufactured products within Asia and the rest of the world.

The result of this is that increasingly, we are seeing many factories moving out of our SE ASia archipelago and going to China, India, Vietnam and South America. With the migration to the lower cost countries, the jobs also move out also. This 'hollowing out' of manufacturing in Singapore has happened over the last 15 years, and with Seagate Technology, once the largest private sector employer in Singapore with 30,000 (in mid 80s) personnel closing its manufacturing plant by end 2010, the end of an era of Singapore being the Winchester city (Winchester being the name of the then 8M 5 1/4" disk drive which was the then standard for all the hard disk drives worldwide. Now, Singapore has no more disk drive manufacturing, only R & D. This is not surprising given the strong S$ and higher costs of labour and land rentals.

The nett result is that many jobs, particularly in Engineering, will be found overseas and while the select few managers can survive by working as senior managers and technical directors in overseas plants for a few years, inevitably, they themselves will be priced out by local cheaper and more hungry personnel from the host country like China or India.

Thats why I am travelling so much, to attend to the business which is primarily overseas driven now. Is there anything, I can do about the situation ? Given that the products which my company represents sell mainly to automotive and electronics manufacturers, the answer is to go into a cheaper producing country and provide equipment distribution and services from there.

Or perhaps move into a sunrise industry like sports and ageing lifestyle services and ride the boom from there. We all need to be globalised citizens, like it or not.