The Nokia China factory at the Xingwang high tech park in Beijing China is a good illustration of what a high-value industrial park should be and can bring to a country.
Uganda is trying to achieve the same in the establishment of its industrial parks in Luzira, Namanve and across regional spots.
Sitting on 75 hectares, the Xingwang Park is also home to related supply industries like DHL, ELCOTEQ, SANYO, SAVCOR, IBIDEN and HIF, which either directly provide industrial inputs or are providing logistical support to the phone-maker.
Together with these partners, this industrial park has created 50,000 jobs. The Nokia factory employs 6,000 people.
Because of the highly qualified technical team and high-tech products, Nokia is now the biggest taxpayer in China. But it is the industrial park, which attracted all the related industries that is not only creating a distribution chain, but changing the landscape.
This concept and the cheap labour force provided by over the 16 million people, in Beijing alone, is causing transformation.
Uganda equally has a cheap and fairly educated labour force.
Having been in China for just 25 years, Nokia has surpassed its tax exemption period and is now the largest country market globally for Nokia products with net sales peaking euro6.42b in 2008.
This adds credence to the argument in the recent Africa tax administrators forum held in Kampala recently about the need to give incentives to investors with a long-term view.
Meanwhile, Nokia is experimenting with a new platform of e-micro-business management that could be used by the vast small and medium size enterprises that dominate most of the developing world.
This is to help with the structural and infrastructural challenges faced by many of the SMEs like the challenge of insufficient electricity supply. In East Africa, it is being conducted in Kenya.
“The idea is to improve on the viability and functionality of the business and ultimately the businesses will spend fewer hours recapping the data,” said a Nokia China official. Features like cash register will be developed and uploaded onto the phone.
Localising content is one of the key innovations coming from the phone maker in an industry driven by innovation and enterprise.
“The technology is to liberate people into higher quality of life,” said the official.
Officials say the platform under study could be an extension of “what we already have.”
Nokia has adapted superior quality control systems to ensure that products leaving the factory are of top quality. There is growing perception that phones made in China and exported to Africa are of inferior quality. But Nokia continues to assure the market that whatever comes out of the Beijing factory is just as good as any product from any of the other nine Nokia facilities.
In Uganda, MIDCOM and Simba Telecom are the two authorised distributors of Nokia phones.
Original here.
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