The critical things that we miss out from our economy enginees -
local successful MNCs. To br frank, gov did a number to
inititatives to nuture our local enterprises, eg SME loans and
market capitalisation for many of the local companies.
But a lot of our business leaders are all very smart. They know
that in order to survive and thrive, they need $$$. So their sole
objective is soley based on building up the $$$. On surface, this
model is 100% correct. But when we examine the way or route that
these local businessmen managed their businesses, then we know why
our local companies always stayed barely afloat.
All over the world, many big names like Norkia or Samsung and Sony
started off as small companies just like any of our SMEs. But the
differences is that their local governments have always tried to
put in these "small-timers" in alot of gov related projects, for
these small timers to grow and learn from the big international
players. After that, these small timers tends to expand their scale
of operations and became the sub contractors of the big guys. Soon
they would go listing and get extra capital for further expansion
and R&D for better products features at LOWER production
costs.
However, for many Sg companies, many of these SMEs just stopped at
the stage after they got listed. They were soon overwhelmed by the
new found wealth that was havested from the stock exchange. The
management lost their focus and tends to spend more QUALITY time,
than actual productive time to map out a global domination plan for
their companies expansion and future growth - let alone R&D. In
the recent articles, you can see that our gov are now panick that
many of the local SMEs are actually quite not-on-par with their
global competitors.
Our businessmen are more concern on how to make the Profit and Loss
Statement look more presentable at the end of the days. They are
less interested to take risk to move up the value chain through
R&D or staff training. Most of them have very narrow tunnel
visions. But we cannot blame them. I understand that their
concerns; Sg is a not a place for FAILURE. Who would want to place
their good fortunes at stake?
