Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Monday, April 29, 2013
Starbucks Opens First New Delhi Store - Tea to Coffee -> Cultural Decline?
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Sunday, April 28, 2013
Zadar, Croatia
Zadar, Croatia, 3000 year old city ...
In July, Craotia will join the EU. The 28th Country of the union.
Any hope for Zadar?
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Saturday, April 20, 2013
End of Asia..rise of USA .. Competition in Manufacturing?
The fighting spirit of smarter competition: It seemed for a while that the United States would leave the manufacturing to emerging markets and focus instead on innovation, design, finance, and super-high-value-added manufacturing. It is now widely recognized that this was a losing strategy. As Andy Grove of Intel once observed, for every manufacturing job generated in the United States by the computer industry, 10 are outsourced to emerging markets. For job creation, it is important to realize that there are many more "makers" than "thinkers." While R&D is spreading around the world, a lot of key innovation remains in the United States, Japan, and Europe. Indeed, leading companies there have adjusted to compete in a world with huge markets outside their borders and aggressively competing emerging world class companies. They are competing smarter and are fighting back. For example:
Apple, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Bloomberg are just some examples of new "brands" and of companies at the leading edge of innovation which did not exist or were tiny a decade ago. Today's world could not live without their inventions, used by millions around the world and which are constantly imitated.
Not only big companies like Caterpillar but many small companies in the United States have adapted to competition from emerging markets by specializing in technologically advanced, higher value, high-precision manufacturing that integrate electronics and use sophisticated automation. American firms hire hundreds of thousands of software engineers in India (and thus from potential Indian competitors). When smartphone baseband chip designer Qualcomm saw that a Taiwanese competitor became the "go to" source for Chinese clones for low-cost processor chips, it dropped its prices and forced it on the defensive. It could do so because it is a price setter with high margins rather than a price taker.
With some jealousy it is said these days in Asia that 90 percent of profits go to Apple and 10 percent to China. This gives these companies enormous pricing power and high margins. What most people don't realize is how concentrated the key parts of the smartphone industry are. There are less than a handful of companies that design the most expensive chips in the smartphone (based mostly on ARM architecture), and they are mostly made by two fabrication firms (TSMC and Samsung). China is way behind in this area. There are also only a handful of companies that make the touch screens for smartphones.
Infrastructure, especially in the United States, fell way behind but, while this remains a political football, more attention is being paid to the importance of infrastructure as a source of competitiveness. There were less "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects than initially believed for the stimulus but the ultimate return on investment may be higher. The United States has regained a bit of ground in the global infrastructure race as new airports, pipelines, and local projects come on stream and shale gas is being developed.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Friday, April 12, 2013
Monday, April 1, 2013
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