![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/files\/2011\/01\/img_7556-1.jpg\")
<\/a>around the world.\u00a0 While 50% of its revenues are still in the United States, the company sees Asia Pacific as its major growth area, doubling sales every 5-7 years,\u00a0 and has made its hub in Singapore.\u00a0 As the finance officer explained to us, Singapore is central to Asia, no more than 7-8 air hours from anywhere, where a headquarters in Hong Kong or China might be problematic in dealing with other regions of Asia.\u00a0 The Asian countries, he explained, were not self sufficient in food, and therefore needed the products and expertise that Cargill brings.\u00a0 For example, the company is building a $290 million factory to process chicken in Shanghai; I hope to be able to visit the plant in 2012 because the manager is a former student of mine at IWU, Omar Sadek.\u00a0 I met Omar about 14 years ago in Shanghai, where, a few years out of his MBA program at Baylor, he’d been given $29 million to start a chicken feed processing plant in Shanghai.<\/p>\nI am fascinated with agricultural businesses, partly because, as a city boy, I don’t understand them; and partly because they are really global in nature.\u00a0 The US has a surplus, and without export markets, American farmers would be in trouble, and the world might go hungry.\u00a0 He also noted that sometimes farm policies, and especially protection of inefficient farming, are counterproductive.\u00a0 One of the faculty, from Mississippi, pointed out that catfish and shrimp in that state must have the origin of the product on the label, to sway consumers to buy “American” rather than Thailand’s products.<\/p>\n
I know from my visit to Cargill in Vietnam two years ago that the company takes seriously its status as a good global citizen; there, we visited one of the 40 schools Cargill has built in areas where the government was too poor to build schools on its own.<\/p>\n
I think what I’ve learned in our business visits is that if more businesses were run like Singapore Inc., they’d be better businesses–and that if more governments were run like Singapore’s, they’d be better governments.<\/p>\n Goodnight on that thought!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the questions we’ve been dealing with is whether Singapore Inc. is a government running a business, or a business running a government.\u00a0 The two notions are certainly connected.\u00a0 The government is a partial owner of some of the most successful businesses, including Singapore Airlines (if you ever get a chance to fly Singapore … Continue reading “Singapore, Inc.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-singapore-malaysia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7316,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions\/7316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>The visit to Medtronic was even more pointed to the benefits of being in Singapore.\u00a0 Medtronic, one of the best companies to work for in America on the Fortune Magazine list, is another Minneapolis-based firm that moved its non-U.S. headquarters to Singapore about two years ago.\u00a0 The company fits the profile that Singapore Inc. desires–it’s in pharmaceuticals (makes pacemakers and stents among other goods); Singapore has given up competing with China\/India\/Vietnam for low-cost manufacturing.\u00a0 The plant manager took us through the history of the plant, which turned out its first pacemaker this month.\u00a0 It was instructive that his assistants numbered engineers who had come from the semi-conductor industry; that was yesterday’s industry, he said, and the Singapore government has actively recruited the “right kind” of businesses to Singapore in the same way it recruits the right universities–even recruiting competitors. There are three Singapore Inc. salespeople in the United States.\u00a0 He noted that while all countries gave incentives, one factor which distinguished Singapore was implementation; he had one contact in the government as an “account manager” who could resolve any problems.<\/p>\n