Professional Documents
Culture Documents
He Tigers That Lost Their Roar
He Tigers That Lost Their Roar
He Tigers That Lost Their Roar
IT IS easy to forget, now that China and India are all the rage, that until ten years
ago South-East Asia was the world's fastest-developing region, winning the sort of
investor attention and breathless column inches that the two new giants now enjoy.
The region has, slowly, recovered from the blight of 1997-98. It has recently had
several years of strong growth (see chart 1) and its governments' finances have
been greatly improved. Even so, after all this time the region's five main economies
—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand—are still notable for
the near-absence of companies that could truly be called world-class.
The region has 570m people and had a head start in economic development over
much of the rest of Asia. So why does it still have no global consumer brands of the
stature of South Korea's Samsung and LG? Where are its rising technology leaders,
like Taiwan's AUOptronics and Taiwan Semiconductor? Where are its equivalents of
India's world-conquering Tata Steel, Ranbaxy and Wipro? Or China's market-
devouring Huawei and Lenovo? Ask an investor in London or New York to name
globally respected South-East Asian firms and the answer is unlikely to consist of
much more than Singapore Airlines.
In a recent book, “Asian Godfathers”, Joe Studwell, a journalist, examines this
failure in stark terms. The region's business scene, he says, remains dominated by
old-fashioned, mediocre, sprawling conglomerates, run at the whims of ageing
patriarchal owners. These firms' core competence, such as it is, is exploiting their
cosy connections with governing elites. Their profits come from rent-seeking: being
handed generous state contracts and concessions, or using their sway with
officialdom to keep potential competitors out. If they need technology, they buy it
from abroad. As a result, Mr Studwell says, the region has “no indigenous, large-
scale companies producing world-class products and services.”
Related items
Fund management: Trillion-dollar babyFeb 28th 2008
Related topics
Vietnam
South Korea
Taiwan
Philippines
Kuala Lumpur
Similar things were once said of much of the rest of Asia—and sometimes still are.
But somehow other countries' top businesses, even in India, the home of the
licence Raj, have escaped this mediocrity trap. Whereas the export-led growth of
South Korea and Taiwan comes mainly from indigenous firms making globally
competitive goods with their own technology, much of South-East Asia's high-value
exports are made by foreign companies. Thailand has built a successful motor
industry by attracting multinationals. But it will constantly suffer the risk that these
will move to somewhere like China, with lower costs and a bigger home market.
Look under the bonnet of what seems to be a well managed, local industrial firm in
South-East Asia, such as Astra, an Indonesian carmaker, and you find that it is
assembling Japanese cars under licence and is controlled by a Hong Kong group.
Not many have got far beyond serving the home market. A recent study by the
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) of the 100 largest multinationals from emerging
economies (a category that excludes Singapore) contained only five from the whole
region. By contrast there were 13 just from Brazil, which has only a third of South-
East Asia's population and which until about a decade ago had no genuinely global
firms to speak of (see chart 2).
Class distinctions
To be counted as world-class, a firm needs to be more than just well run and large.
It should have a globally valued brand, or its own leading-edge technology, or a
genuinely innovative and admired business method. These are demanding
standards: even some of those in BCG's top 100 are really just plain big. In South-
East Asia few companies meet them. Some come close, especially in Singapore, the
region's most advanced country. Singapore Airlines is the world's fourth-largest
international carrier and is perhaps the region's best-known brand around the
world. Keppel and SembCorp, the world's two largest makers of offshore oil drilling-
rigs, dominate their industry.
However, some of Singapore's tech stars are showing signs of fading, worries Garry
Evans, an equity strategist at HSBC. Chartered Semiconductor and Creative, for
example, are slipping behind rivals in places like Taiwan, which now has “a critical
mass in technology and a very entrepreneurial culture,” he says.
In banking, the region has some impressive contenders, like Singapore's OCBC and
Malaysia's Public Bank, which are expanding beyond their borders. But now these
must contend with China's huge and increasingly muscle-flexing banks as well as
Western ones with deep roots in the region, such as HSBC and Standard Chartered.
As in other types of business, the region's local champions lack scale in a world
where critical mass seems to matter ever more.
Admittedly, the region has some natural handicaps. The ten members of the
Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) have a huge variety of languages,
religions, political systems and histories. Even the most populous member,
Indonesia, with 230m people, is itself enormously diverse, being made up of 17,000
islands and a rainbow assortment of cultural and religious traditions. By
comparison, Brazilians may dance theforró in the north and the samba in the south,
but theirs is a pretty homogeneous and monolingual country of 190m, all on one
land mass.
That said, ASEAN's leaders could do much more to keep their lofty promises of
European-style economic integration, to give local companies a sizeable home
market from which to build world-beating businesses. Their failure to construct a
genuine single market is shown up by the fact that ASEAN's members still do three
times as much trade with non-members as they do among themselves. Internal
tariffs have been cut, but as McKinsey, a management consultancy, noted in a
report in 2004, product standards and other non-tariff barriers often differ
among ASEAN countries, forcing manufacturers to make small production runs for
each country.
All this lowers the competitiveness of local firms, as well as multinational companies
operating in the region. Corruption is another great burden on business. That is
true elsewhere in Asia too, but several South-East Asian countries—notably
Indonesia—are afflicted by corrupt and unreliable judicial systems, making it
difficult to enforce contracts.
Malaysia has also spent heavily on universities and the promotion of technology but
its efforts have been stymied by the country's messy racial politics (including
preferential university places for the Malay majority) and by the handing of state
contracts and concessions to undeserving government cronies. Both the lack of fair
competition between businesses and the failure to widen access to education may
have a common underlying cause: that South-East Asian countries remain in the
grip of narrow elites.
The problem betrays itself not just in the region's relative lack of memorable
business names but in its basic economic statistics—in particular, labour
productivity, the key to long-term growth. Productivity in China and India is
growing much faster than South-East Asia's is. East Asia overtook the region in
output per worker by 2000 and has continued to power ahead. Now South Asia is
closing the gap (see chart 3). Not even hosting the factories of so many
sophisticated multinationals seems to have made much difference to South-East
Asia. With all those Indian and Chinese pairs of hands joining the global workforce,
the region has no option but to seek to move beyond simply offering low wage
costs and produce better-educated workers and more innovation.
It is not all the fault of governments. The region's unwieldy conglomerates could do
more to help themselves achieve global scale by concentrating on fewer businesses.
Some are doing so, but others still seem unable to resist poking their fingers into
another pie. The food-and-drink arm of Charoen Pokphand, a Thai conglomerate, is
in BCG's top 100; but the group is an unspectacular contender in industries from
telecoms to convenience stores and is now moving into carmaking. San Miguel of
the Philippines, a big beer-to-food conglomerate, recently talked of trying its hand
at generating electricity. Synergy Drive, the absurdly named merger of three
underperforming plantation firms controlled by the Malaysian government, is taking
a stake in the giant Bakun hydro-dam in Borneo.
This dilettantism was once summed up damningly by Michael Porter, of Harvard
Business School: “These companies don't have strategies, they do deals.” Gerry
Ambrose in the Kuala Lumpur office of Aberdeen Asset Management laments that it
is indeed hard to find Malaysian companies with “a business plan that will last ten
years”. Many firms have improved their profitability since the 1997-98 crisis but
that may not guarantee their long-term survival. Because even the best-run firms
often have boards and shareholder lists dominated by the founding family and their
friends, it is hard to believe that their thinking will change.
Of the “godfatherish” firms profiled in Mr Studwell's book, one that analysts say is
among the best performers is YTL, a Malaysian conglomerate. Big in construction,
the firm also owns a British water firm, Wessex Water, operates hotels and
upmarket shopping malls, runs a high-speed rail link from central Kuala Lumpur to
the city's airport and owns a chain of power stations. Its founder, Yeoh Tiong Lay,
built a giant construction business with state contracts in the country's early post-
independence period. In the 1990s, when his friend Mahathir Mohamad was prime
minister, the firm got concessions to generate electricity using subsidised gas from
the state oil firm, which the state electricity firm was obliged to buy.
Nice work if you can get it. But the founder's son, Francis Yeoh, who now runs the
firm, insists that it has not just rested on its laurels. It has delivered, he argues, “a
55% annual compound growth in profits” since the mid-1980s and it now earns
70% of its revenues outside Malaysia. On February 22nd it declared a profit for the
six months to December 31st of 688m ringgit ($202m), 24% more than a year
before. The firm does have a core competence, says Mr Yeoh, which is to build and
maintain infrastructure assets of first-world quality at third-world prices. Even the
group's hotels and shopping malls should be seen as “unregulated infrastructure”,
he argues, stretching the point somewhat.
Submit to reddit
Recommend (120)
E-mail
Share
o Facebook
o LinkedIn
o Twitter
o Delicious
o Digg
o more...
Print
Reprints & permissions
Related items
TOPIC: Vietnam »
Houses in Sudan: Little boxes
Vang Pao: Unfinished business
From the archive: From the archive: Guns in America
TOPIC: South Korea »
American science education: The Difference Engine: More pennies, please
Reporting in North Korea: Not the Pyongyang Times
South Korea raises interest rates: Enter the "war on inflation"