Thursday 2 August 2012

Fourth day---manufacturing companies

  Based on the information of wikipedia, half of the Malaysia economy is made up by agriculture and manufacturing sector which have about 49 % of Malaysia economy activities.

  What am I trying to prove is that Malaysia is still heavily relying on traditional business model and there is one problem with it---labour force. If you were non Malaysia and had been here before you would realize that majority of labour force in manufacturing and agriculture are double-LOWs (low skilled and low wages) foreign workers.

  This is extremely unhealthy. Indeed, manufacturing is concerned about costs of production. If cost is high, their profit would be affected. Another thing is we have less-advance-technology to support the sector and causing them demand a lot of low-cost workers to sustain their operation.

  We have a lot of good companies such as Hertalega, Kian Joo, F&N etc.They all have dominant positions in Malaysia or region. This indicates that we are still doing good in the prospective of business.

  Whatever how good they are, and how much they can generate in long term, the biggest problem is labour force. If they want to expand capacity of production within the country, then the only way to be efficient enough---employing low-cost foreign workers. It has become an essential. Otherwise, they have to move out to other country, or improve the production-technology (it takes a lot of times and costs), or they improve the employees benefits.

  Any method they adopt will have pros and cons. Nothing is perfect but could be done excellently. Somehow we as investors should concern about the whole picture too instead of over-focusing in micro stuff.