Gość: jr
IP: *.sydny.datafast.net.au / *.sydny.dft.com.au
02.10.03, 06:41
no i kolejny artykul ktory pokazuje jak US przegrywa walke walczac swoim
mieczem - tak zwana wedlug nich KONKURENCYJNOSCIA. tak ,tak ani amerykanski
zakaz skupowania waluty ani legendarna wydajnosc nie moze dorownac
liberalnemu niewolnictwu w azi. czas chyba sie tam rozgladac o robote! za
dolca na godzine! oj ciezkie czasy nadchodza....Blame India for that jobless
recovery
By Alan Kohler
October 2, 2003
American Express has its fraud analytics department based in India - 60 PhDs
sit in a room watching credit card use patterns in America, looking for
fraud.
JP Morgan has a team of research analysts in Mumbai; another investment bank
has a team of PhDs in Moscow doing global quantitative analysis; McKinsey has
a research centre of 130 MBAs just outside Delhi.
General Electric is hiring 2000 people a month in India; HSBC now does all
its mortgage processing there; Ford employs 1000 design engineers in India.
Neptune Orient Lines has centralised its global accounts receivable, accounts
payable and general ledger operations in Shanghai; Motorola has its R&D
centre in Russia, where it employs rocket scientists to design mobile phones.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, American politicians are becoming obsessed
with the jobless recovery in the US.
As Steve Roach of Morgan Stanley reported this week, 21 months into the
economic recovery that began in November 2001, US employment has fallen 1.2
million. Relative to the average pick-up in employment at this point of the
cycle, that represents a job shortfall of 4.2 million.
This is beginning to overtake security as the number one political issue in
the US, and much of the focus is on China. A rise in protectionist sentiment
is showing up in a new bill proposing an across-the-board tariff on Chinese
goods unless China floats/revalues the yuan, and yesterday Treasury Secretary
John Snow promised to keep up the pressure on the Chinese to float the
currency.
There's no doubt China is taking a leaf from Japan's book and using the
currency to improve export competitiveness, but there's much more to it than
that. There's India, and services outsourcing too - also known
as "offshoring", or "best-shoring" among the real jargon hounds.
Employment in the US services sector has remained unchanged over the past 21
months as the economy has recovered; usually the services industry headcount
has grown 5 per cent by this stage of the cycle. The employment growth is
happening in India instead.
It is mostly a labour cost arbitrage play. An Indian PhD costs less than
$US10,000 a year - 80 per cent below the starting salary of a similarly
qualified person in the US. Indian universities are producing 2 million
graduates a year, all of whom can speak perfect English.
The other side of this coin is the western corporate focus on headcount as a
management tool. It's not just that companies contain costs through blunt
headcount restrictions - although that's a big part of it. It is also the use
of headcount to allocate overheads through the group.
I spoke to two Australian investment bankers this week - heads of Australian
branches of big Wall Street firms - who are being driven mad by overhead
allocation. Every time they hire someone, the person's salary is loaded up
with a corporate head office allocation - including the cost of the corporate
jets parked at La Guardia - which is often greater than the salary.
What's more, when you are at the end of the food chain - like Australia, say,
or Des Moines, Iowa - you end up copping a disproportionate share of the head
office overheads because those above you have kept their share to a minimum
before passing the parcel.
But supply arrangements with other organisations - say an Indian call centre
contract with Accenture - don't attract any overhead allocation at all.
The bottom line is that the American corporate system with its focus on
headcount, also used by most Australian firms, is directly leading to the so-
called "jobless recovery". On the other hand, executives and directors have a
fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to lower costs where possible, and
there is a snowballing effect taking place as companies find their
competitors are getting big cost savings by shifting the call centres to
India.
The system of offshoring now gathering unstoppable momentum has been made
possible in the past few years by high-bandwidth telecommunications, which
allows processing centres in low-cost countries to communicate seamlessly, in
real time, with head office.
Although firms like GE, Ford and the US banks are leading the trend in the
US, and the consultants like McKinsey, Accenture and PricewaterhouseCoopers
are pushing it, offshoring is slow to take off in Australia.
There is great sensitivity here about how the unions and politicians will
react if call centres and data processing are moved offshore too quickly.
Recently, a few hundred unionists stopped traffic outside Telstra's Melbourne
headquarters protesting about its IT processing contract with Indian firm
Infosys.
This Australian reluctance so far is why this country's economic recovery is
so far not a jobless one - like America's is.
But protests or not, Australian firms will be forced to catch up: drudge
work, whether making shirts or data processing, is moving to cheap-labour
countries.
Australia will become a nation of salespeople, waiters and - one sincerely
hopes - journalists. The Mumbai Morning Herald, anyone?
