Europe is faltering in Electronics Contract Manufacturing.  A  bright spot can be discerned, however, coming from the industry’s single biggest growth engine: China. Overall expectations point to another round of high single-digit growth this year in that country, which already accounts for more than half of the contract manufacturing industry’s aggregate revenues.

China also has grown to be the world’s largest consumption market of smartphones and PCs—some of the end products it helps produce—so China’s pace of growth in those markets will determine how quickly those areas expand.

China, though, is no longer the nexus of cheap labor, instead sitting atop a list of countries characterized by low manufacturing wages. China in 2011 had wages averaging $2.19 for each worker per hour, which is rising at nearly 15 percent per year.

Despite this, IHS does not believe another region in the world is likely to emerge as a new low-cost manufacturing location. In most cases, the infrastructure—including power, water and transportation—of locations under consideration is simply not adequate or robust enough to support large-scale manufacturing, especially when compared to what the industry now deploys in two of its largest manufacturing locations in China or Mexico.
The worldwide contract manufacturing industry also will contend with other significant issues in 2012. For instance, the soundness of companies and their balance sheets will continue to be scrutinized after the bankruptcy filing in October 2011 of major player Elcoteq from Finland. In addition, there likely will be continued pressure on suppliers to ensure among customers that they are in compliance with all local labor laws given the recent announcement by Apple to allow outside monitors into its supplier facilities.

On a positive note, the continuing popularity among consumers of devices like smartphones and tablets means contract manufacturing in these areas can be expected to help compensate for slow growth elsewhere in the industry. A shift toward fewer product offerings in the notebook industry also will have positive impacts, leading to improved inventory velocity throughout the besieged PC notebook supply chain. Moreover, lower component pricing this year should help improve industry margins for the near term.

hese are some startups or entrepreneurial competitions in and across Africa. We have linked some sources that described them where the main sources are not readily available. Notice there are some with global dimensions.

Besides these ones below, there are many countless ones within national boundaries like the frequent competitions in ccHubNigeria. Kenya’s iHub has been running quality programs as well.

• IPO48,
• Garage48,
• App Circus,
• Huawei developer challenge.
• Nokia’s Create for millions Contest,
• infoDev’s Top 50 competition,
• Google Android Sub Sahara contest,
• Apps4Africa.
• Samsung’s Bada Developer Challenge,
• Ericsson Applications Award
• infoDev’s m2work Micro-work Challenge.
• Pivot 25, the predecessor of Pivot East.
• Startup Weekend

On Friday, we woke up to see another hacking of Nigerian Federal agency website. This time, it was EFFC – a corruption watchdog that should be a beacon of security. The guys protesting on the fuel subsidy dropped this message:

 

“The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has detained Managing Director of CONOIL, Mike Adenuga, Managing Director of African Petroleum, Femi Otedola, Managing Director of MRS, Sayyu Dantata and others; as well as officials of the PPPRA and NNPC who defrauded the nation to the tune of several billions of Naira.

Twenty-one (21) executive directors have been detained in all and at the moment been interrogated over fresh information that they allegedly stole fuel subsidy funds. More information will be released later.”

 

It is a hoax – there is nothing like that. Over the last few months, government websites have been hacked and it seems our nation has no solution to this. It is time someone has a plan to stop this problem before these guys declare a war  before people know it is not real. Imagine if they post what we cannot even write here on government websites and the stock market panics and Nigeria gets into real trouble. We need a solution and our ICT experts must be brought in to help protect and secure the sites.

EEFCC, what a shame that your site is that porous. Who knows if you have a way of protecting our national legal assets in your possessions.

Despite this statement we reported yesterday that was issued by Nelson Mattos, Google’s Product & Engineering VP for Emerging Markets, does Mocality have a legal basis to sue?

“We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We’ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.”

Can Mocality sue Google for damaging their business? Evidence shows the Google has tried to deceive and trick customers. This is identity theft at corporate level. If you read the whole episode, Google has committed a crime and Mocality must seek legal advice to begin a proceeding.

Tekedia thinks that Google should be sued for $10m to cover the corporate calamities their actions have caused Mocality. Mocality, retain a lawyer in U.S. and begin this process. Do not bother in Kenya as Google will influence it.