A really really rich guy wants his country to be China:
Eike Batista isn’t just another entrepreneur who likes Apple products and doesn’t mind having dinner with Steve Jobs every two months or so. No, he’s more like the eighth richest person in the world according to Forbes, and Brazil’s first billionaire.
According to MacMagazine, the guy would like to bring Apple’s manufacturing process to Brazil, to create job positions, generate revenue and lower costs of Apple products for Brazilian customers. Apple currently gets its products made in China, through Foxconn.
Oh and if he doesn’t manage to close a deal with Apple, he’ll go straight to BMW.
BMW would work, Apple not so much. The average apple product has a bazillion parts all manufactured at different factories in either Taiwan or Guangdong. The final product is then assembled in China. Foxconn manages a lot of this process, but they have to outsource the vast majority of the technical work. Which is why Apple news sites are constantly getting leaked footage of new apple products from Taiwan. Unless this guy establishes this entire process and knowhow in Latin American, he’s not going to be able to overcome the efficiencies of scale.
Though he’s the 8th richest man in the world, so I wouldn’t put it past him to recreate Taiwan in the Amazon rainforest.
BMW makes a good amount of sense. I would actually be surprised to find out that there isn’t a BMW factory already up and running in Brazil. I visited one in Egypt, and that country has far less money. Auto companies tend to set up factories in the country of sale, because cars are large things that are expensive to transport. As much as we talk about our beloved GM factory jobs, the largest employer of autoworkers in America is Toyota.
That said, I think it would be a good trend if Brazil started trying to compete with China on low end manufacturing. They probably aren’t going to get anywhere near China’s economies of scale, but they could quite quickly move up the technical latter, and provide knock-on benefits for several regional economies. It’s also always good to diversify out of finance and commodities as much as possible.
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