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PEOPLE
buy. So, the more people this world has, the more
opportunities people have for businesses to prosper—or
their inventions to pop up.
Who said
population explosion is a bane?
No, on
the contrary, it’s a boon. Always.
Look
around you. It is in populated areas where people put
up their businesses. Near schools. Near churches.
Near movie theaters. Near bus stops or bus stations.
Near hospitals. Near wet markets. Near banks. Near
malls. Even near Meralco and Maynilad offices, or near
government offices for that matter.
You put
up your store or shop or stall in a secluded area, what
business awaits you there?
We are
not Gates, the Gokongweis, Tans or Sys, who could now
sit in a rocking chair gazing at the sunset, wine,
lemonade or beer in hand—and the cash register would
still keep on ringing merrily just the same.
We need
to be creative all the time, imaginative, if we hope to
succeed in our chosen line of business—or craft of
creation.
Of
course, every business, every invention or innovation,
has a uniqueness all its own.
TAKE the
motoring industry, for example. The automotive business
is not merely about building and selling cars. No.
It’s not just simply man and machine conspiring to
invent an engineering marvel for our highways. It is
more than that.
To build
a car, you need the three Ms—Man, Money and Machine.
Man provides the money and the money produces the
machine. Together, they create the miracle known as the
car. A car that satisfies, satiates, our insatiable
longing for comfort and self-gratification at owning the
latest state-of-the-art monster from the motoring
business.
POWER is
oftentimes attached to money. As the saying goes, “He
who has the gold controls.”
China
now has the power to control the world—in a manner of
speaking—because of its sheer number of people. Its
population of nearly 1.4 billion is almost a fourth of
the world’s total.
But by
control here, I mean the control derived from the buying
power of China. As one sage so correctly put it, “One’s
superiority in numbers would oftentimes produce the
desired results.”
Generally, China’s masses of people aren’t rich. But
just imagine combining all the crumb-monies of a billion
people?
A sea of
bills would still ensue, enough to drown all of the
Toyota assembly plants combined, including its Lexus
line.
OF all
the car companies in the world today, it is stunning to
note that Honda is taking the lead in doubling its
efforts to invade China. Not GM. Not Ford. Not
Chrysler. Not Toyota. Not Nissan. Not Volvo. Not
Mitsubishi. Not Isuzu. Not BMW. Not Jaguar. But
Honda.
Recently, Honda announced plans to boost its production
capacity in China by about 20 percent to 650,000
vehicles annually to grab a large share of the Chinese
market.
If this
isn’t stunning enough to its rivals, I don’t know what
is.
Honda,
Japan’s
second-largest carmaker after world leader
Toyota,
said it will invest some ¥10 billion ($95.8 million) to
double its capacity in the Dongfeng Honda factory to
240,000 units as early as this year, the Nikkei business
daily has reported. The report also said Honda intends
to increase the number of stores selling the Acura
luxury brand from eight to 20.
Already,
Honda has three sales networks with a total of 560
dealers across China; it plans to add another 140
dealerships by the end of 2008 and hopes to sell roughly
490,000 vehicles in China in 2008, up 15 percent from
2007.
Last
month, Honda reported that it produced 3,955,483
vehicles in the fiscal year ended in March, its 11th
consecutive year of record production. The carmaker
sold 2,658,801 cars overseas in fiscal 2008, up 12.3
percent from 2007. However, sales in Japan declined 7
percent, the sixth straight year-on-year decrease.
Before
this, Honda also announced that it would unleash its new
hybrid car in 2009, one that is being ballyhooed as much
cheaper than any hybrid being sold in the world market
today—including the bestselling Prius.
NOT to
be outdone,
Toyota has likewise unloaded its own salvo: a third-generation
hybrid that is extraordinarily “greener,” which will
roll off its assembly lines shortly.
Toyota
has targeted China as a hybrid market as early as seven
years ago. It bore fruition when, on December 15, 2005,
it began production of the Prius in China; sales started
on January 15, 2006. Being the first car manufacturer
in the world to sell the hybrid car in China, it’s but
right and politically correct that Toyota’s Prius
remains the bestseller in the hybrid segment in a
country with a new-found freedom to own private
property—if not luxury.
Honda
began selling its Civic hybrid in China in November 2007
and hopes to double, if not triple, its efforts at
capturing a huge chunk of China’s hybrid-infatuated
nouveau riche by year’s end.
Honda’s
not saying it, but they predict that they could be
neck-and-neck soon with Toyota in China in the race for
hybrid supremacy, given that Honda will shortly unravel
the cheapest hybrid car in the market.
GET
this: Honda clearly knows that with Beijing’s private
ownership laws drastically liberalized, if not radically
relaxed to sky-high proportions, China, founded in 1949
by the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao Zedong, has become a
virtual businessman’s delight.
Labor
there being the world’s cheapest, investors have not
stopped pouring in their resources in massive expansion
moves all across the communist mainland, which is but
one of only few countries with consistently strong
growth prospects the last 10 years or so.
Virtually all of the world’s motoring moguls have
swooped down on China to firmly erect their assembly
plants there so that our dream car might just one day
suddenly swish through from the once-sleeping giant of
the 20th century.
The
possibilities are simply limitless in this world that
has the innate capacity to produce garage-scientists
like Bill Gates, junk peddlers like Lucio Tan and shoe
vendors like Henry Sy, who, from virtual scratch, all
went on to become the greatest industry leaders of their
generation.
It is
dreams that people are made of. Ronald Reagan said,
“The future belongs to the brave.”
Twenty,
thirty years from now, who knows what kind of a car we
would be driving? With hybrids possibly becoming
commonplace by then, we might not be driving that
car-of-the-future anymore; we might yet be flying it and
call it “carne”—from the contraption of car-plane.
And,
should that be the case, pray tell me, who would have
any need of the Wright Bros.? |
