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| Preparing for the Friday event |
Since the time I have landed here, there has not been a single day when
this small country has failed to amaze me. I mean even Delhi is more than
twice the area of the size of this country. Here people pay almost ten times
more than what I pay in India for owning a car. Imagine paying 50 lakhs for a
Swift or 90 lakhs for Toyota Corolla!!! The weather is not at all pleasant,
cost of living is high, single party system, caning is still prevalent as mode
of punishment and what not, but still it is a favorite destination amongst
businesses as well as tourists. Unfortunately, even though Indians contribute a
lot to the Singaporean economy, corporates or policy makers are hardly betting
on India which can be interpreted from the discussions we had or presentations
that were shown.
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| Trying Chinese Lunch |
Just the other day, there was a discussion on Chinese culture and surprised
to hear that it is not difficult to distinguish a Singaporean
Chinese from China Chinese. It was an eye-opener to know that Indian and
Chinese culture have similar elements. We had tryst with Chinese food and
our effort to use chopsticks were marked with irony. I am not joking, and it is
quite an effort to eat with chopsticks and it in a way proves that these folks
are really hard working. It is another story that most of us went to food court
to satiate their tummies. In the afternoon, we had quite a productive
discussion at Research Management Institute at NUS where we got to learn about
the mechanism being followed by different rating agencies around the world. The
common aspect between rating agencies is that everyone uses around the same
data source but come up with different rankings based on their evaluation
mechanism.
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| Understanding Art and Culture |
The sessions at NUS are slowly getting serious with talks by Industry
experts, business houses and government agencies in Singapore. We got deep
understanding on how Singapore is controlling its exchange rate against basket
of currencies despite being a surplus economy. An industry talk session by CEO
of CWT Limited was quite fruitful. We always thought that China is the place
for cheap labor, but was quite interesting to note that Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia
are much cheaper. Despite pay higher rise expected in these, they would still
be cheaper than China. Also learnt about the efficient cargo clearing
capability of Singapore where 80% of cargo is cleared in 8 minutes while 100%
is done in 15 minutes!!!
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| Jurong port |
The talk by Zafar Momin who is on board of
MapleTree Trust was quite
interactive with many counterviews with regard to strategy and implementation
coming up. The discussion was mostly centered on real-life and he stressed on
understanding rather than memorizing. He mentioned lot of interesting
quotes one of which is, "If the going is too easy, may be you are
scratching the surface". Explained in simple words that life is
challenging and nothing comes easy. We also visited
Jurong Port which is a
privately managed port in Singapore primarily handling cement cargos. I was
pretty excited for this as I have never been to any shipping facility before.
We also had a visit to
Ikea Factory and got insights into its marketing and
sales strategy. The layout is designed in a very convenient way so as to make
it easy for any customer and at the same time optimizes its operations cost. No
wonder they sell the stuff cheap and most of us contributed to
Ikea cash flow that day :).
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