It takes more than just Blarney and a smile

Date Published: {J}

Perhaps the best indicator of just how cut-throat the competition has become for international jobs investment was a recent mention in Time magazine of the transfer of work which is now taking place in Asia.

While we have had a growing impression here of just how competitive the jobs market place has become between the Western economies and those such as China and India, the Time story brought the ‘trade’ just one more hugely important step.

For it revealed that the Chinese – long one of the most feared competitors on the world market for foreign direct investment – are already outsourcing certain work to Malaysia, where it can be done more cheaply and then sent back to China.

It is a salutary piece of information in view of the closure of the TalkTalk call centre and customer service centre in Waterford with the loss of close on 600 jobs, not to mention downstream implications for goodness knows how many other jobs in services and shops and the like, which were dependant on the TalkTalk jobs.

One can presume that the newspaper figures are in the correct ‘ballpark’ when they say it would be cheaper by as much as €80 per worker per day to do the work of TalkTalk in India, China or a number of other countries where wages are dramatically lower.

The stories of how much cheaper it is elsewhere to do things, proliferate . . . China has become a world force in industry built on consumer products built cheaply in a low-waged economy, which has the added advantage of an undervalued currency which makes her a fearsome competitor on world markets.

And the sheer scale of her workforce and the scale of her industrial development is the stuff of legend – word is that in one case of an Irish industry that was moved lock stock and barrel to China, the workers losing their jobs could not find on the map the city to which the jobs were going, despite the fact that the Chinese city had more than four million inhabitants.

The stories are legend of the scale of development in China . . . of one industrial estate which is 18 miles long. Some of them may be apocryphal, but they serve to illustrate the kind of new superpower which has arrived and which is competing on world markets for the investment dollar.

It’s a far cry from the days in the early 1990s when Digital was closing its hardware section in Galway and the battle then was between Galway and a centre in Scotland, which is not to say that the battle was any less intense, nor the propaganda from Scotland any less hard hitting than we might get from China.

So, a bit of Blarney and a smile, which can never go amiss, will not be enough to keep us to the fore in chasing the vitally important foreign direct investment . . . for it now seems clear that recovery will not come from the domestic market, but from export-led figures which, hopefully, will eventually bring our economy around from its present parlous state.

The reason we are among the world leaders in areas such as software, medical products and pharmaceuticals is that we are among the best in the world in the area, that we can meet the most exacting standards in quality control, and our young people are damn good in the area.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.