Chindia vs LatAm

By Gonzalo López Martí@LopezMartiMiami

Amazon came out with a cell-phone.
The Amazon Fire.
Who’s next?
Wanna know who’s next?
Can you handle the truth?
Burger King.
Or maybe Delta Airlines.
Let me elaborate: in the not-so distant future, mobile devices will be a customizable, white labeled, probably disposable, Chindia-manufactured commodity.
A promotional tchotchke.
Merchandising.
Yes, like stress-balls, key chains or memory sticks.
That’s what Chindia does to stuff.
You and I see the Amazon Fire phone as a new shiny object.
The cognoscenti see it as another potentially dangerous Chindian Trojan horse.
Google is aware of this reality.
They tried to push back, protect the technology, bring manufacturing back to ‘merica.
Their reaction was, in my humble opinion, a bold strategic bet.
They acquired Motorola and set out to manufacture phones on US soil.
Unfortunately, the dream was short-lived.
For reasons unbeknownst to us mortals, the plant was surreptitiously shut down a few months back.
Apple is quite aware of this ominous state of affairs too.
Methinks they are doing it all wrong.
They are trying to buy their way back to branded coolness through acquisitions (Beats audio).
They are fiercely protecting their patents in international courtrooms while desperately hedging the psychological turf occupied by their logo.
Designed in California by Apple. LOL. Give me a break.
Your patents and your brands are no good in Chindia, pal.
Chindia makes the gadgets.
Chindia makes the rules.
Chindia is home to half the world’s population.
The Koreans already found out how to create desirable brands: Samsung.
How long until Chindia follows suit?
We could bomb them into accepting our, errr, freedom, our brands and our patents.
Mmm.
Chindia ain’t no Afghanirak, I’m afraid.
So.
The world is a-changing.
No new news there.
The global rule of American brands will be over soon.
Brands are only as good as the share of market willing to pay a premium for them.
Forgive me for stating the obvious.
The wizardry to create brands will not be a Western monopoly anymore.
We gotta get ready.
This is a huge opportunity for LatAm though.
The US needs us now more than ever.
I use “us” because I hold dual citizenship.
LatAm is home to 500+ million people.
An unqualified labor force with low disposable income, yes.
Said labor, however, could become pretty qualified in less than a generation.
500+ million avid consumers of branded gadgets.
Evenly manufactured throughout a seamless, modular industrial footprint spread out across the three ‘mericas.
Generating income and a decent standard of living for a captive market of 500+ million people.
500+ million people who would thus be totally OK with staying put and quite unwilling to risk their lives crossing a desert into a potentially hostile country.
Granted, 500+ people is not even 1/4 the population of Chindia.
However, these 500+ people are right here, across the border.
All of them living, with some minor exceptions, in functioning democracies presenting zero military threats in the hemisphere.
One hell of an advantage, if you ask me.
Logistically, environmentally, culturally, legally.
Needless to say, this will require a free trade area.
A real one.
Free & well-oiled transit of goods and labor.
A truly competitive marketplace sans covert protectionism or bulls**t trade barriers.
Lots of folks, mostly in the flyover states, will kick & scream, of course.
Too bad.
Chindia is monopolizing the world’s blue collar jobs.
How long til they start absorbing the white collar ones too?
Let me remind you that China is a Communist totalitarian state with a horrible human rights track record.
Our leaders are aghast about a few hundred Central American children trying to cross the border but they don’t seem to care about the fact that every product we consume -pretty much every SKU you find on a Walmart shelf- comes from a dystopian concentration camp with 1.3 billion inmates, nuclear weapons and overt expansionist appetites.
In short: the train of history -and prosperity- is leaving the station.
If the elites north & south of the border keep bickering over immigration and fail to see this reality pronto to focus on the real challenges at hand, well, we will all be learning Chinese and Hindi pretty soon.
Anglos and Latinos alike.
To migrate there ourselves.