In Asia, it’s no longer an arbeit macht Whirpool mentality.

Several hours on NJ Transit today gave me time to read The Economist:

Not so long ago, the most exciting thing about emerging markets was their cheap labour. Local firms supplied first manufactured goods and then services to developed markets and multinationals. That remains and attraction, but a declining one as wages in emerging markets and transport costs go up…Increasingly, though, the most exciting thing about emerging countries is the rapid growth in the number of consumers in their own markets, and in the number of entrepreneurs to serve them. Already wealthy consumers in these countries have proved a godsend to the world’s leading brands of luxury goods.

Goldman Sachs calculates that the global middle cass — which it defines as people with annual incomes rangin gfrom $6,000 to $30,000 is growing by 70 million a year and rising

Cutting to the point, several questions fly through my rather eccentric head:

What happens when a host of countries that for some time have been ruled authoriatrianly grow quickly, and administer business from a state focus? Despite the fact that people ruled by autocrats don’t seem, in my experience, to have a very generally held approval for the speaking-to-power mentality, there is an ironic sense of justice in these nations that because they are filled by poor people, things should be offered to them cheaply.

AirTel, the Indian market leader, charges what may be the lowest prices in the world — around two cents a minute for nationwide calls — yet is hugely profitable, thanks to an innovative business model in which many of its operations are outsourced to big multinationals such as Ericsson and IBM.

One of the strongest lessons of the decade to come out of emerging economies, I predict, will be that end-around services and super cheap mobile, tech and emerging technologies can be made available to massive audiences and that they will not come from the so-called “West.” Those industries that are Western-centric are rooted in behemoth models that serve to maximize the most profit from each consumer, and that means charge as much as you can, even at the expense of customer service and follow through.

We belong to a new emerging economy, one where cheaper services and devices can be made available to everyone. And it doesn’t matter where consumer or worker lives.

What will you do then, AT&T? Argue for protectionist political leaders, is my guess. I hope you don’t do that, really, it makes elections frustrating and it stalls the truth of globalism, that it doesn’t have to come from American anymore.

As reported in The Economist, we have moved from an international model, where company’s base their headquarters in one nation and do business abroad through sales offices, to one where one corporation had mini-models of itself spread globally, to one where now the company can exist anywhere and is mobile:

This way, “work flows to the places where it will be done best.” The forces behind this had become irresistibile, said [IBM's CEO Sam] Palmisano. This ambitious strategy was a response to fierce competition from the emerging markets.