Forbes: How Mexico Can Leapfrog India and Become America’s Automaton Workshop
Mexico's I.T. offshoring industry ranks as #3 in Gartner’s global rankings, lagging behind only India and the Philippines, according to analyst Frances Karamouzis. Its ambition is to take second place. Given that Mexico now claims to graduate 130,000 engineers every year—which is more than the U.S.—this may not be impossible. At an event hosted by Mexico's I.T. confederation, CANIETI, I was asked for advice on how the country can achieve this objective. The challenge, as it was described to me, is twofold: that Mexico’s engineering education is not uniform in quality and that the curriculum is in any case incomplete, leaving graduates without necessary skills.
I told CANIETI that its challenge is the same as India once faced. India’s education system has the same problems of inconsistency and incompleteness. To compensate for this weakness, Indian industry developed a surrogate education system. But even if Mexico learned from India and reeducated its graduates, it would face another big hurdle: that the market for I.T. outsourcing has plateaued.
That’s because the I.T. departments that the outsourcing companies sell to are losing their power. With users having home access to iPads, social media, and downloadable apps—all of which are more sophisticated than what I.T. departments usually offer—user departments don’t need I.T. as much as they used to. They are themselves choosing solutions from companies such as Salesforce.com, Google, and Microsoft—which use cloud computing to provide the infrastructure. As a result, the hundred-million-dollar outsourcing deals are fewer and further between. And the trend toward user control is accelerating.
My advice was that Mexico target another emerging market, one that is likely to be bigger than I.T. services and that it is in the catbird seat to own. It can leapfrog Indian I.T., which is busy defending its outsourcing turf and has become complacent because of its size.
The opportunity is to help America re-automate its manufacturing industry. I have written previously about Chinese manufacturing's having peaked and about why it is nearly certain that manufacturing will come back to the U.S. Advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and 3D printing are going to savage China's labor-cost advantage.
Take the Baxter robot, which Rethink Robotics announced recently. It has two arms, a face that displays simulated emotion, and cameras and sensors that detect the motion of human beings that work next to it. It can perform assembly and move boxes—just as humans do. It will work 24 hours a day and not complain. It costs only $22,000. It's just one of many advances to come.
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is making it possible to develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems such as Apple’s Siri, and computer systems that can make human-like decisions. A.I. technologies are also finding their way into manufacturing and are powering robots such as Baxter.
A type of manufacturing called “additive manufacturing” is making it possible to cost-effectively “print” products. 3D printers can create physical mechanical devices, medical implants, jewelry, and even clothing. The cheapest 3D printers, which print rudimentary objects, currently sell for between $500 and $1000. Soon we will have printers for this price that can print toys and household goods. By the end of this decade, we will see 3D printers doing the small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods. In the next decade we may be 3D-printing buildings and electronics.
These technologies are becoming available and cheap, but America's manufacturing plants aren't geared up to take advantage of them. This is what opens the opportunity for Mexico. It can set up automated factories across the border that manufacture at costs comparable to China. Mexican services firms can master the new technologies and help American firms design new factory floors and program and install robots. This is a higher-margin business than the old I.T. services.
Rather than focusing on yesterday’s markets and technologies, Mexico’s firms can be focusing on tomorrow’s advances and become America’s automaton workshop. With Mexico's growing skilled workforce and its proximity to the U.S., this could be a big win for Mexico and for the U.S.
