With smart customization we can now start competing with low-wage countries. In China they solve capacity problems by hiring more hands, we do this by organizing engineering and production in a smarter manner, for example by designing integrally modularly build product families. Machine builders can use this to quickly serve up their clients a competitive price.

It is an attractive thought, but I doubt that the world is (still) so well-organized. Because wages rise quickly in countries such as China, so they also have to start working in a more clever way. Something that should be possible considering the fact that each year one million engineers graduate from university. I estimate that labour costs in machine building will become a marginal factor and that technology will become an increasingly less distinctive factor. Just like production technology: that is, in principle, the same in price everywhere and the knowledge to utilize it also becomes more widespread.

Cost leadership and production leadership – to use the well-known model by Treacy & Wiersema – does not work anymore. What is left is the relation leadership as a possible decisive factor. Our experience is that internationally operating machine builders want to work globally from one product platform. And they want to develop that platform centrally, but still be able to make regional versions. It then comes down to customer intimacy, or knowing the client and their client, the end-user. And as is happens, that is just the thing we in the Netherlands are good at. Because of excellent industrial marketing, a great many machine builders in various niche markets all over the world can build up a leading position. Smart globilization the Dutch way.

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