actually I tend to envy them more, they have the right idea.
Their manufacturing they started like us, then they moved into
counterfeiting and imitation manufacturing from there their
learning curve actually increase dramatically.
If you look at it from another light it's actually another form of
contract manufacturing cum reverse engineering. You are taking
apart a product and learning how to build it all over again bit by
bit, part by part to perfection ie make another copy, if you have a
large scale of industries that can do that imagine why you cannot
come out with a similiar product to sony or hitachi or nike but
under a different brand name and compete with them.
The taiwanese also started out like that with counterfeiting but
they shrewedly did it with semiconductors like computer parts,
motherboards in the 70's - 90's but instead of calling their
semiconductors copies it's called OEM, look where are taiwanese
products today, you can find them in almost all markets around the
world in the form of semiconductors, chips, electronics and many
are under their own taiwanese brand.
Now China is also trying to follow as taiwan and thailand and hope
to replicate that success and increase the learning curve.
We started out with small scale software counterfeiting but along
the way we gave in to US preassure, had we not given in and went
ahead to higher forms of reverse engineering I think today our
situation will be vastly different and probably already have a
number of application out in the market under our own singapore
brand. We will not be in the predicament that we are in
today.
