Ceramics industry faces challenge posed by China

In the past two decades, decorative ceramics exports had been selling like hot cakes. Its initial success so impressed government, it even groomed the industry as a potential world champion.

Enter the biggest economic dragon in Asia, the Peoples Republic of China, with its huge pool of cheap labor, ability to mass produce hand-made goods and a global network of ethnic Chinese ready for tapping as distributors.

From one of the most promising sunrise industries, decorative ceramics made in the Philippines now faces the challenge of fighting with more cunning Asia’s Goliath economy, or the bleak prospect of getting swallowed whole in a few years.

This challenge has been admitted by industry leader Renato Pleno during a consultation meeting the other day with a team of consultants fielded by the James E. Austin Associates commissioned by the USAID to help Filipino export industries adopt sound strategies to fight off their rivals. Pleno is the representative of the non-metal export industry to the policy-making board of the Philippine Exporters Confederation (Philexport).

In the thick of battle, makers of low-end products like ordinary mugs, have fallen. Those that produce fancy, hand-painted vases, are getting to fight for their lives for the Chinese have also learned to do the same thing. Only the enterprises that make unique, hard to imitate decorative ceramics have managed to stick to their markets.

Industry leaders feel they need to find new strategies to get into fighting form before they get overrun by the competition.

After Martin Webber, J.E. Austin Associates, has outlined how they helped shape industries in Sri Lanka and Mongolia extricate themselves from similar dilemma, the ceramics manufacturers saw there is a good chance they can still find their rightful place in the global market place.

With the consultants, they have come to realize that they can better stay on the export arena if they can evolve a common vision on where they want to place themselves in a wide market with a range of ceramic products from the unsophisticated mugs, to construction materials, and highly specialized industrial uses including nuclear power plant.

After determining a common vision and setting their sights on a particular position in the international market, they may then decide if they undertake forward integration or fight as a team in cluster of related enterprises which includes their suppliers, movers and distribution networks..

The exercise of fighting as an industry, instead of doing it on their own would be difficult in a country where team-work among normally competing enterprises will be a new experience to most of them.

But they simply have few choices. Their best weapon, or rather, partners in the trade war, remains the pool of creative Filipino craftsmen who have fertile imagination to create unique items the mass producers could not copy.

In the end, they have to share the bonus of winning with their own workers or lose them to the opposition. Abe P. Belena, Philexport News and Features.