Category Archives: A Fistful Of Euros

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Korean Companies Outsourcing in Russia

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“Russia is our No.1 destination for technology outsourcing,” says Cha Dae Sung, who is in charge of “global technological cooperation” for Samsung.

And Samsung is not alone. LG Electronics, Daewoo Electronics, and hundreds of smaller companies rely heavily on Russian engineers, who labor either from Korean suboffices in Moscow or in the office towers of Seoul. “There’s an enormous pool of scientific and engineering talent we can tap into in Russia,” says Song Yong Won, Russia specialist at the state-run Korea Institute of Science & Technology.

Read the whole thing.

Europe’s ‘Sad Day’?

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“A sad day for trade relations between the US and Europe”. This is how John Disharoon, vice president of the trade committee at the American chamber of commerce to the EU described the decision by the European Union to begin imposing trade sanctions on US goods as of today. Of course, the arguments about why this measure is totally justified (or conversly totally un-justified) will be legion. However, at the end of the day, I can’t help agreeing with the above-mentioned comment. With all the problems we face out there in front of us, with all the dangers of a renascent protectionism which we can clearly see inside the US itself, this, it seems to me, is the last thing we need right now. It wreaks of the worst kind of logic of bureaucratic decision making.
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Weber & Nader

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An unusual combination, but a persuasive argument. Over at Daily Kos.

Given that I was asked about Nader on German radio yesterday, it’s worth a look at this left-of-the-aisle site to see why he won’t have an impact on this year’s presidential election in the US. If Europe has to put up with a second Bush term, it won’t be Nader’s doing.

Macedonian Crash

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Throughout the recent Balkan wars, Macedonia was the shoe that stubbornly refused to fall. Wars in Bosnia, in Kosovo did not spread to Macedonia. The blockade imposed by Greece in the early years of independence did not rise to open conflict. Latent Bulgarian claims were amicable resolved. Chaos in Albania did not become contagion. Many reasons account for Macedonia’s relative good fortune, and capable leadership is certainly one of them. Now the country’s president has crashed into a hillside in Bosnia.

At present, Macedonia is doing something that no state in Western Europe has managed: running a state while accommodating a minority population that is (estimates vary) between one quarter and one third of the total. Good luck to them, and I hope that Trajkovski’s successor can stay the course.

Interestingly, the fallen president was a convert to Methodism and a former theology student. It’s an interesting twist on questions of church, state and laicism.

Italy’s No-Growth Update

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OK I’m on a roll, so I’m going to stick my neck out. This slide in the Italian confidence index apparently surprised the ‘experts’. Well it shouldn’t have surprised Fistful readers who have been following what I have been saying. Clearly these confidence indexes are not the last word in sliced bread. But they do mean something, and Germany’s Ifo index just turned in another bad reading too.

Ever since Parmalat, I have been asking one simple question: will Italy ever grow again? Of course, the simple answer is possibly it will: never say never. But will it ever get back to vigorous growth: this I doubt. I am even half asking myself if we will see positive numbers in more than say 50% of the forthcoming quaters. Remember, if my demographic thesis has any predictive power it should be precisely here in Italy that the Titanic starts to take in water. Parmalat was simply the iceberg. Of course my thesis could always be wrong. Any takers?
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Let’s Go To Bulgaria

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Actually just after my Chinese visitor dropped by I received a Bulgarian one, my former ‘research assistant’, young Bulgarian anthropologist Yassen Bosev. And what did Yassen want? To tell me to Forget India, Let’s Go To Bulgaria. Only trouble was, I had some bad news for him: India’s minister of Disininvestment and Technology, Arun Shourie, already got there first. Why does everyone think Indian president Kalaam was in Bulgaria on his first overseas visit late last year?
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Going Into Business

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“Madam Wang Haiyan, who runs a pre-school class from her home, reckons that she would have been earning half of what she is now and be less happy to boot if she had stayed in her job at a state-owned firm. “

Any one else round here old enough to remember Dustin Hoffman’s ‘Little Big Man’, with the character who insisted on riding his horse back to front? I feel a bit like that sometimes: with my back-office for India and China right here in Barcelona. Of course this makes life pretty surreal, people waltz in on the messenger at all times of the day and night: from all the strange corners of the planet.

This morning it was the turn of one of my ‘sources’ in China: he came in over the messenger to tell me he’d left his job. He has had a ‘new’ idea. He is going to set up a company to do guess what? Outsourcing. He is dead set on it since he tells me he can get university graduates in China to work for him for ‘just’ 150 dollars a month.

Actually in his case no one is going to accuse him of destroying western jobs: he wants to design and put up websites for Western clients who want to sell to Chinese customers. We might well ask ourselves however, if he is succesful in this how long it will be before he leverages his position to start offering those websites in more distant climes. And good luck to him.
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It’s expensive, but we’re rich!

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Remember this debate about the relative living standards of Sweden and Alabama? One little commented result of the euro, krona and pound?s rise against the US dollar over the last two years is that measured in current exchange rates European countries? income per head now compares rather more favourably against the United States.
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