The Manufacturing Industry in Developing Countries

INTRODUCTION

The manufacturing industry is vital for developing countries as driver for growth and employment. As the country maturing as manufacturing power house it also drive the innovation, trade and productivity to the people. The two forces that influence manufacturing in the coming decade will be the demand and innovations in product design. The demand is of course is the shift to developing economies. Consumption of developing economies could account for nearly 70% of global demand of manufacturing products. On the innovation part, using the latest technology the product designers gathering billions bytes of data collected from social media to understand the product and technology in demand.

The emergence of China in manufacturing is certainly a major impact on industrialized economies. If anything, developing countries expanding market are seen as opportunity rather than a treat for developed countries. The developed countries home market consumption expected to drop with saturation and companies are exploring for opportunities for market access in developing countries. In this environment manufacturing companies are constantly rethinking their location strategies to be competitive in global market.

The location strategy not only considering path of lowest wages but several other important factors such as high skill workforce and market access. The study by service organization shows 15% of North American firms and 29% of European companies are not manufacturing their product in their home markets [5]. Companies increasingly look at the whole world as their market increasing the flows of goods, capital and information. The automotive manufacturing is most suitable sector for analyzing the global manufacturing strategies....

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...ility. Based on the data collection, the improvement activity for Indian and Thai automotive manufacturer is Total Quality management and Just-In-Time (JIT) respectively which align with their top competitive priority.

Both country automotive manufacturers have given priority for the factors needed improvement to compete in competitive global market to sustain and grow their respective automotive manufacturing industry. Indian companies giving high priority in quality management while Thai manufacturers emphasizing on delivery aspects. Both manufacturers have less priority on the flexibility which is direct contrast to industrialized countries where flexibility is given high priority. Although Indian has known for their high capability in technology, they didn’t utilize the capability to expand their automotive industry to exploit the global market opportunities.