I have visited the World Intelligent Manufacturing Summit 2018 which was organized in People’s Republic of China, Nanjing on October 13. I truly believe that the former Asia Pacific’s bellwether in manufacturing industry – Malaysia shall catch up from automation aspect, otherwise its economic development will be affected due to the competitiveness lag.
In China, its intelligent manufacturing has experienced rapid development; from the “automation” integrated from automatic production line to the “informatization” of the industry informatization, to the industrial internet and “internet-enabled” of the Web of Things and to the “intelligence” of the intelligent production.
One of the reasons causes Malaysia’s destitution is the long-term stagnation of wages, and this question of wages shall be integrated and discussed together with: firstly, the correct positioning of national competitive power together with strategy execution, for example, the big blue print of Industrial 4.0. Secondly, a fair investment climate in order to improve the output value of various industries and industrial upgrading. Thirdly, complementing and strongly promoting automation even intelligence in various industrial to increase efficiency. Fourthly, significant reductions on the proportion of immigrant labor under the current total workforce and double-wiping up the legally registered illegal migrant workers. Fifthly, pursuing and charting out regulation to gradually rising the minimum wages. Sixthly, transitioning of the excessive college graduates who are lacking of technical ability to technical industry and strengthening the technical and vocational education.
Let’s take Foshan, a city in Guangdong China which abuts Guangzhou, as an example. There are overall 20 Million population in Guangzhou and Foshan and their GDP is higher than Beijing and Shanghai. In the past, there are various heavy-polluting industries in Foshan, for example ceramics and furniture. After that, according to their positioning of national competitive power on its machinery and equipment industry, coordinated with the strategy of forging a machinery and equipment industry worth trillion yuan in Pearl River Delta Economic Zone and industries collaborated under the concept of “GuangFo-City”, the investment in leading intelligent equipment, industrial robots and industry technological improvement have increased 30.9%, they are also drastically implemented manufacturing automation, for example, a soy sauce factory can bottling around 48 thousand bottles of soy sauce in 1 hour with only 5 workers operating the production line.
Ministry of International Trade and Industry is currently finalizing the “The Blue Print of Industrial 4.0”, which will cover the area of artificial intelligence, network security, mechanization, big data management and etc, in order to achieve “Human-Machine Collaboration” to improve national productivity. There are all the significant policies which concern the future development direction of national economy and shall be paid close attention by all the people.
In the meantime, the new government is also constantly enhancing the reformation of political system because a strong policy will make an enterprise stronger, a dynamic economy will bring prosperity to a nation.
The area shall the new government to pay most of their attention to is the economy and their biggest challenge is generating economic value and promoting economic development. Malaysia’s top talents in various industries span the globe, so the government shall establish an economic team to call upon those global expertise to form various consulting teams in various key areas, guiding the citizen and enterprises to encounter the challenge brought by the rapid change of situation and to compete with the countries in the world.