4 ms·

Was half way through your post when I was about to write my comment about hidden champions,glad you mentioned it. This is something that tends to be overlooked

Was half way through your post when I was about to write my comment about hidden champions,glad you mentioned it. This is something that tends to be overlooked quite often. Very very few countries have a model like this.Take the UK, as an example.An average town or even small city rarely has anything that isn't just for local market. For a lot of companies it's kind of fine,as the market is big enough to earn comfy living for the owners, but that's it. The default in most countries is something like: " ok,I'll sell this in local area and maybe,just maybe,if I become super big,then we'll start exporting". It's shame really. I see this mentality in my own country, Lithuania,where an average purchasing power is relatively low and the market is super small(1/5 of London population) ,yet the default option is to start locally. Luckily the IT sector is different,where most businesses default to foreign markets.

jotm 7y ago
It's absolutely baffling. I've been looking into it for cheeses and ales, so many UK producers flat out say "We only ship within the UK" even though the cost of shipping is covered by the buyer and it would cost nothing, not even extra paperwork, to ship to the EU (for now).
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  Sometimes owners deliberately wabt to stay small,I do understand it, however I don't get it as well when people refuse extra orders,as in your case.
- gandalfian 7y ago
  Bonded warehouses exist for a reason. Internationally shipping alcohol or (tobacco) is genuinely complicated even within the eu. Cheese probably just a perishable pain to post far.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
There used to be tens of thousands. In 1979 there was a policy decision to end UK manufacturing and focus on the City and services. No end of highly successful UK export businesses disappeared. Many of them quietly a world leader. Many of them famous names that had existed for a century or two. Sheffield was the steel city with all the production, infrastructure and suppliers to feed all the cutlers, precision instrument makers, tool makers, scissor makers and all the other specialisms surrounding tool steel and stainless steel. The Potteries, well you can probably guess that one. So it went on around the regions of each city and across the country. I go beyond it being a shame, it's criminal, or bloody well should be. We have had no chance of balanced export books since 1980. If you search around the web, there's a lot of archive sites showing what was lost -- though in truth it was far more an intentional destruction.
- xadhominemx 7y ago
  Probably a good thing that an effort was made to transition Sheffield to a services-based economy because steel was going away no matter what.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Can't agree. Mild steel and bulk wasn't the strategic industry it was once considered by every nation, and was going as it was predicated on price. That's probably fine unless there's a major war. The hugely expensive deep specialisms, and really unusual steels and steel products that were made in just three or four places in the world, one of them Sheffield, need not. cough Iraqi supergun -- though Sheffield Forgemasters are actually one of the few still around, thanks to govt underwriting due to their nuclear capability. Funny that. Nor need the manufacturing of some of the world's finest precision tool and instrument makers. A tiny few survive, despite government best effort, not because. Most were eagerly snapped up by US, German, French or Japanese -- if they still exist at all, it's as name made elsewhere and a fattening of someone's portfolio. Of course many disappeared without trace, and of course a fair selection that weren't worth saving having got fat and lazy, or overly unionised. While morons were cropping up on UK news throughout the eighties and nineties trying to persuade us that making anything was obsolete (and so frequently that it quickly got as overused, tedious and cliched as the recent Theresa May election slogan "strong and stable government"), Germany quietly got on with new services and manufacturing. Their mittelstand(sp?) and technical training regularly cropping up as something for the rest of Europe to envy. UK disassembled the last of the technical colleges, apprenticeships, and all the regional centres of knowledge and excellence. No matter how keen you're unlikely to pick manufacturing for your new UK business, as we are exceptional in the extent of our disassembly of the sector. How did Sheffield's future as a centre of telephone call centres work out? Or Central Belt's reinvention as world centre of electronic and IT manufacture? How did the focus on the City work, when right after the "big bang" Wall Street went on a shopping spree of stupendous size leaving few native survivors?

jotm 7y ago

It's absolutely baffling. I've been looking into it for cheeses and ales, so many UK producers flat out say "We only ship within the UK" even though the cost of shipping is covered by the buyer and it would cost nothing, not even extra paperwork, to ship to the EU (for now).

cosmodisk 7y ago
Sometimes owners deliberately wabt to stay small,I do understand it, however I don't get it as well when people refuse extra orders,as in your case.
gandalfian 7y ago
Bonded warehouses exist for a reason. Internationally shipping alcohol or (tobacco) is genuinely complicated even within the eu. Cheese probably just a perishable pain to post far.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

There used to be tens of thousands. In 1979 there was a policy decision to end UK manufacturing and focus on the City and services. No end of highly successful UK export businesses disappeared. Many of them quietly a world leader. Many of them famous names that had existed for a century or two. Sheffield was the steel city with all the production, infrastructure and suppliers to feed all the cutlers, precision instrument makers, tool makers, scissor makers and all the other specialisms surrounding tool steel and stainless steel. The Potteries, well you can probably guess that one. So it went on around the regions of each city and across the country. I go beyond it being a shame, it's criminal, or bloody well should be. We have had no chance of balanced export books since 1980. If you search around the web, there's a lot of archive sites showing what was lost -- though in truth it was far more an intentional destruction.

xadhominemx 7y ago
Probably a good thing that an effort was made to transition Sheffield to a services-based economy because steel was going away no matter what.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Can't agree. Mild steel and bulk wasn't the strategic industry it was once considered by every nation, and was going as it was predicated on price. That's probably fine unless there's a major war. The hugely expensive deep specialisms, and really unusual steels and steel products that were made in just three or four places in the world, one of them Sheffield, need not. cough Iraqi supergun -- though Sheffield Forgemasters are actually one of the few still around, thanks to govt underwriting due to their nuclear capability. Funny that. Nor need the manufacturing of some of the world's finest precision tool and instrument makers. A tiny few survive, despite government best effort, not because. Most were eagerly snapped up by US, German, French or Japanese -- if they still exist at all, it's as name made elsewhere and a fattening of someone's portfolio. Of course many disappeared without trace, and of course a fair selection that weren't worth saving having got fat and lazy, or overly unionised. While morons were cropping up on UK news throughout the eighties and nineties trying to persuade us that making anything was obsolete (and so frequently that it quickly got as overused, tedious and cliched as the recent Theresa May election slogan "strong and stable government"), Germany quietly got on with new services and manufacturing. Their mittelstand(sp?) and technical training regularly cropping up as something for the rest of Europe to envy. UK disassembled the last of the technical colleges, apprenticeships, and all the regional centres of knowledge and excellence. No matter how keen you're unlikely to pick manufacturing for your new UK business, as we are exceptional in the extent of our disassembly of the sector. How did Sheffield's future as a centre of telephone call centres work out? Or Central Belt's reinvention as world centre of electronic and IT manufacture? How did the focus on the City work, when right after the "big bang" Wall Street went on a shopping spree of stupendous size leaving few native survivors?