- cross-posted to:
- china@sopuli.xyz
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
- news
cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/804918
The manufacturing sector’s woes have left Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, who took power last year, struggling to fulfil his promise of bringing average annual GDP growth to 5% over his four-year term, up from 1.73% in the past decade.
“The industrial sector has slumped and capacity utilisation has fallen below 60%,” Srettha told parliament last week. “It is clear that the industry needs to adapt.”
Supavud Saicheua, chairman of the state planning agency National Economic and Social Development Council, said Thailand’s decades-long manufacturing-driven economic model is broken.
“The Chinese are now trying to export left, right and centre. Those cheap imports are really causing trouble,” Supavud told Reuters.
“You have to change,” Supavud said, arguing that Thailand should refocus on making products that China wasn’t exporting while strengthening its agriculture sector. “No ifs or buts.”
The factory closures between July 2023 and June 2024 increased 40% from the preceding 12 months, according to the latest Department of Industrial Works data that has not been previously reported.
As a result, job losses jumped by 80% during the same period, with more than 51,500 workers left without work, the data shows.
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The story not being told is that Chinese factories are absurdly automated compared to the rest of Asia - their competitors are South Korean and Japanese factories, but they’re entering markets that are still heavily labour-centric. China is spearheading this new evolution of industrial manufacturing and everyone else is forced to either adapt or die.
How can the Chinese subsidiarize so many things but other countries won’t?
Is China that rich or do those companies just lose money left and right but have more saved than others and thus they can break the market and take it over?
Economics says that Chinese companies are just more efficient as a whole - through sheer competitive advantage, China can produce more per work-hour than everyone else. In fact, this has been a huge problem for China’s labour demographics as there’s just simply no more manufacturing jobs - an auto factory that would’ve employed thousands just a decade ago might employ barely a few hundred today. Instead of outsourcing to other countries, most of those jobs have been literally outsourced to robots
Instead of outsourcing to other countries, most of those jobs have been literally outsourced to robots.
Good, those are exactly the types of jobs that should be automated by robots. Not AI generated art and creative.
The Chinese subsidies are different than most other countries.
It is a collection of city and province leaders whose performance is reviewed on a variety of metrics, including economic growth. So, a lot of local governments invested in a ton of manufacturing capacity.
They are significantly overinvesting to the point it is a known bubble. However, it isn’t exactly known what the national government is going to do to handle the aftermath of this, especially as most local government finances are a mess. At minimum, the national government has recognized that it should try to sell what it can.