Where Manufacturing Thrives

Dec. 21, 2004
IndustryWeek's fourth annual analysis of industry's most productive -- and promising -- locations.

Integrated circuits and clean rooms are replacing the smoke-stacks of steel plants and other heavy manufacturing in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, where more than 40 companies are now making computer chips or related products. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean, Portugal is building highways, planning high-speed train lines, constructing mass transit systems, and modernizing airports to be better able to move products and people. At Port Said East, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Suez Canal, a US$1 billion trade port and industrial city is being built to facilitate the movement of goods between Europe and Asia and to boost Egypt's manufacturing and exporting capabilities. Macau, the Portuguese colony that reverted to China in December 1999, is strengthening its economic ties with the Pearl River Delta region, a robust manufacturing, financial, and shipping center that includes the cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. The names may not be as familiar as Silicon Valley, Stuttgart, Rotterdam, or Shanghai, but no company can afford to ignore them. They, too, are places where the dynamics of world-class manufacturing are being played out in the opening years of the 21st century. It's been said before, but it bears repeating: A new economy is emerging. In the U.S., for example, "it is a knowledge- and idea-based economy [in which] the keys to wealth and job creation are the extent to which ideas, innovation, and technology are imbedded into all sectors of the economy," observes the Progressive Policy Institute, Washington. Significantly, however, the information-driven new economy is taking shape both within and beyond U.S. borders. Indeed, there's a palpable excitement in manufacturing communities around the globe as the still-strong U.S. economy rewrites modern economic history, as the economies of Asia and Latin America recover from their recent downturns, and as Europe again prospers. Consider the macroeconomic context. The current U.S. expansion is now 109 months old. The only relevant question is how fast an inflation-wary Federal Reserve will let the economy grow this year. (Bet on 3.5%.) Meanwhile, Japan is expected to post 1.8% real growth in 2000, compared with only 0.8% in 1999, figures Merrill Lynch & Co., New York. For the other Asia/Pacific economies, Merrill Lynch forecasts a heady collective growth of 6.3%, even better than their not-exactly-shabby 5.7% performance in 1999. From 0.1% growth in 1999 Latin American economies are expected to post a healthy 3.6% real growth rate this year. And the 15 nations of the European Union are projected to pick up the pace of economic recovery this year, with growth reaching 3.2%, compared with 2.2% in 1999. As manufacturers develop, produce, market, ship, and manage a staggering array of goods and services for an increasingly interconnected world, they are tearing down functional barriers of all kinds and taking to the 'Net in an effort to bring themselves closer to customers and to increase speed, productivity, and profits. Significantly, "the astonishing swiftness with which the Internet has grown suggests that the business cycle is moving much more rapidly than in the past, and localities need to update economic development strategies with this accelerated business cycle in mind," states New York-based Kerstin Nemec, national partner-in-charge of KPMG LLP's business incentives group. Nevertheless, only a few manufacturing communities around the globe can lay claim to true world-class status. It's tough to meet the qualifying criteria; being a center of production, though essential, is not enough. World-class manufacturing communities also are marketing centers (such as Seoul), logistics centers (Singapore and Shanghai), development centers (San Jose and Singapore), and headquarters sites (Houston and Stuttgart). Meanwhile, many other communities continue to work at attaining world-class status, seeking to create competitive advantages for the companies that have their R&D, production, marketing, logistics, and headquarters activities within their metropolitan boundaries. It is this dynamism of communities defining competitive advantages and improving upon them that is at the heart of 21st-century manufacturing and of IndustryWeek's exclusive worldwide perspective on the places where manufacturing makes a difference.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

 John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.
      
      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).
      
      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.
      
      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”
      
      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.
      
      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
      

 

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