Black and White
26 November, 2013
Wherever you are in the World reading this, most of Ireland remains gutted at our last minute loss to New Zealand’s All Blacks on Sunday afternoon in Dublin.
It still hurts like hell. Nonetheless I hope that some good may still come from it. The truth that we are feeling in Ireland this week is that in sport, however professional or competent you may be, there are no prizes at all for coming second.
Many will argue that sport is not life and that the taking part is as important as the winning. That is a valuable perspective at a time like this - but no more or less true.
Indeed, the win/lose metaphor seems much more appropriate to our manufacturing and economic life at this present time. In business, things are done or not done by people; sales are achieved or not; orders are won or lost; planning permissions are granted or not; production solutions are made – or not made. There is, in truth, much more black and white to our activities than we would like to admit.
At Ceramicx, we are, as ever, continuing to share the black and white truth with our colleagues; customers and suppliers and also with Government, local and national.
It is fine and laudable, for example, to urge on Ireland’s small companies to export more. We have several notable multinational examples to follow, in food, drink and other sunrise industries such as telecomms and healthcare. However, SME exports and MNT ‘exports’ are hardly similar and costs of any MNT’s global business are likely to be borne globally– not from the manufacturing site in Ireland.
At Ceramicx, for example, we export over 95% of our production reaching over 65 countries worldwide and have already put in the costs relating to; market research; sales; distribution; promotion; exhibiting; joint ventures; advertising; publicating; logistics; shipping; currency work; trading and shipping. However skilled and professional a company you may be, there’s simply no getting around these charges on export business. If you can’t accomodate them – no exports.
Black and white again. It can be a very valuable metric to use and we hope to be using it more with various business issues in the near future.
26 November, 2013
Wherever you are in the World reading this, most of Ireland remains gutted at our last minute loss to New Zealand’s All Blacks on Sunday afternoon in Dublin.
It still hurts like hell. Nonetheless I hope that some good may still come from it. The truth that we are feeling in Ireland this week is that in sport, however professional or competent you may be, there are no prizes at all for coming second.
Many will argue that sport is not life and that the taking part is as important as the winning. That is a valuable perspective at a time like this - but no more or less true.
Indeed, the win/lose metaphor seems much more appropriate to our manufacturing and economic life at this present time. In business, things are done or not done by people; sales are achieved or not; orders are won or lost; planning permissions are granted or not; production solutions are made – or not made. There is, in truth, much more black and white to our activities than we would like to admit.
At Ceramicx, we are, as ever, continuing to share the black and white truth with our colleagues; customers and suppliers and also with Government, local and national.
It is fine and laudable, for example, to urge on Ireland’s small companies to export more. We have several notable multinational examples to follow, in food, drink and other sunrise industries such as telecomms and healthcare. However, SME exports and MNT ‘exports’ are hardly similar and costs of any MNT’s global business are likely to be borne globally– not from the manufacturing site in Ireland.
At Ceramicx, for example, we export over 95% of our production reaching over 65 countries worldwide and have already put in the costs relating to; market research; sales; distribution; promotion; exhibiting; joint ventures; advertising; publicating; logistics; shipping; currency work; trading and shipping. However skilled and professional a company you may be, there’s simply no getting around these charges on export business. If you can’t accomodate them – no exports.
Black and white again. It can be a very valuable metric to use and we hope to be using it more with various business issues in the near future.
