Why Mexicans Don't Drink Molson. Andrea Mandel-Campbell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      That shift entails more than simply making the leap from the United States to the rest of the world. It also requires a fundamental rethink of how to conduct business abroad. “We don’t have a vision of the world that lets us think outside the box,” says the Conference Board of Canada’s Prem Benimadhu. If companies and government are to avoid repeating past failures, they will have to approach overseas markets with a new understanding and respect, as well as have a strategy in place that capitalizes on their competitive advantages. “If ever there was a time for Canada to have both a North American strategy and a long-term, non–North American strategy, it is now,” writes Wendy Dobson, professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.²⁸

      If not, Canada will be forced to contend with the flip side of complacency risk: irrelevance. Stanley Hartt fears it is already happening. He recalls flying down to New York in 1998 to see whether Salomon Smith Barney’s corporate chiefs would be interested in acquiring Nesbitt Burns, the investment banking and brokerage arm of the Bank of Montreal, which would have likely been spun off if a planned merger between BMO and the Royal Bank were to proceed. Salomon’s management immediately dismissed the suggestion as “crazy.” Why would they bother buying a Canadian broker with a return on investment of 15 per cent, they asked, when they could get 25 per cent in emerging markets?

      “When the leading financial institutions talk about countries in which they are making investments and building and growing, Canada is not on the list,” says Hartt, noting that foreign-ownership restrictions on banks and insurers are a large part of the problem. “The real danger is when foreign investors say, ‘Why do we bother with Canada?’”

      Back at El Coronito in Mexico City, the sun’s white glare highlights the green flecks in Bruno Perron’s hazel eyes. It’s so bright, waiters scramble to unfurl a patio awning dusty with the accumulated detritus of a large, teeming metropolis. The Quebec native absent-mindedly brushes off the flakes of grit that drift down onto our table. He, like others who have ventured down here, has gotten used to seeing beyond the city’s smoggy veil.

      At the age of thirty-eight, Perron now heads up his own multi-million-dollar import–export outfit with offices in Canada, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Shanghai and India. When asked what advice he would give his fellow Canadians, Perron contemplates his chili-spiked beer for a moment before taking a swig. “Wake up,” he says with an air of exasperation.

      * Canada–U.S. trade represents the world’s largest cross-border exchange between any two nations, but trade between the United States and the European Union is larger.

      * Barbados, Ireland and Bermuda hold the third, fourth and fifth spots respectively for top Canadian investment destinations, followed by France and the Cayman Islands in the sixth and seventh positions.

      * Only Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia fare worse.

      * This calculation is based on the European Union being treated as separate countries rather than a single bloc.

      † In 2004 Canada racked up a record trade deficit of $11 billion in automotive trade with non-NAFTA countries.

2 STEEL DINOSAUR

      “ There is not a part of the country where people are not feeling the dramatic changes as a result of globalization. The question is, where does Canada fit?”

       PERRIN BEATTY, PRESIDENT, CANADIAN MANUFACTURERS & EXPORTERS

      WALKING DOWN Barton Street in Hamilton’s east end for the first time is like stepping into an old Star Trek episode in which the crew is beamed down to a lost civilization. Its once impressive structures are eerily vacant, slowly mouldering under the weight of eons of neglect. Everything appears frozen in time, as if the unsuspecting population had no warning before disaster struck. Once-luminous neon signs hang disconsolately, rusting and faded, while the door to an abandoned barbershop swings open. At one shoe store, the smell of mould is so strong it penetrates the glass storefront. The walls of the half-empty display cases are peeling, and the shoes, scattered at unnatural angles or hanging perilously from half-dislodged hooks, are covered in dust and discoloured by the sun. The only ostensible signs of modernity are fast-cash depots, numerous Tim Hortons shops and a few down-at-heel bargain-basement stores, one fittingly dubbed the “Last Chance Outlet.”

      It wasn’t always like this. Barton Street used to be the swanky shopping district for the well-paid blue-collar workers who found jobs in the hundreds of factories that sprang up along the shores of Hamilton Harbour. At first a beachhead for textile mills and foundries started by waves of new immigrants, the border town with the best port on Lake Ontario soon became the capital of the country’s steel industry and a favoured spot for multinationals looking to set up branch plants in Canada.

      By the 1950s, Hamilton was a boomtown. The heaving blast furnaces and black-plumed smokestacks were signature signs of progress that formed the bedrock of a thriving industrial hub. Railway freight cars criss-crossed the city’s east end, and the port hummed as factories churned out everything from agricultural equipment and household appliances to Studebaker cars and Life Savers candies. During the halcyon days, Steel Town, as it became known, was home to corporate heavyweights like Procter & Gamble, Westinghouse and General Electric and was the country’s uncontested manufacturing and industrial capital. It was a proud, can-do kind of place.

      But in less than a generation, the steely foundation that girded the city to the country’s industrial engine seems to have crumbled like cardboard. The once-thriving east end looks more like a “war zone,” says Rolf Gerstenberger, a veteran steelworker who has watched as factory after factory closed up shop, their rusted-out, soot-stained remnants the only clue to the city’s former glory days. The gradual decline that began in the early 1980s continues inexorably to this day. In recent years, Camco, one of Canada’s few remaining appliance makers, Slater Steel and jeans manufacturer Levi Strauss & Co. have all closed their plants, shedding thousands of jobs.

      “When I started thirty-two years ago, it was the industrial heartland,” recalls Gerstenberger. “There were probably twenty factories with over a thousand people in each one — Stelco, Dofasco, Firestone, Westinghouse, International Harvester, Otis Elevator. The kids just went from one factory to the other until they found one they liked.”

      “Well, that is all gone,” he says. “I don’t know what the kids are going to do — McDonald’s or something — because there’s no place else to go.”

      Even the mighty steel industry, the city’s heaving heart and last hope, is a hollowed-out shell of its former self. At one time, Stelco and Dofasco, the two big steel companies, employed more than thirty thousand people in their hulking steelworks overlooking the bay. But in the past two decades, financial crises and downsizing have whittled the workforce down to twelve thousand. In 2004, Stelco filed for bankruptcy protection and, after a $100 million provincial bailout, emerged much downsized and largely owned by New York hedge funds. Dofasco now has European minders, the concession prize in a high-stakes tug-of-war for global steel domination.

      Although the two companies were very different — one profitable, one not — neither could avoid the whirling juggernaut that has laid waste to so much of Hamilton: globalization. In its latest incarnation it is convulsing the steel industry through a combination of massive new capacity in low-cost countries like Russia, Brazil and China and the creation for the first time of global behemoths in the historically fragmented steel sector. The new paradigm, which redefines the winners and losers in the industry, is dictated by size, low cost and global scope. On each count, the Canadians came up short.

      China СКАЧАТЬ