Australia not right environment says EMC manager

Stan Beer
Sunday, 26 September 2004 17:08

Question: Why does storage and information giant, EMC, locate a giant hardware manufacturing centre in Cork, Ireland, while all Australia gets is a couple of call centres and some sales offices?

Answer: Australia does not have the right environment to set up a high-tech manufacturing facility while Ireland does.

This is the sad fact related to us by EMC Australia and New Zealand national product manager, Clive Gold. According to Gold, EMC, on track to turn over US$8 billion this year, supplies the entire global market except for North America from its plant in Ireland. All of the company's core development takes place in the US, Israel and Ireland, while the low level coding is done in India.

Meanwhile, our supposedly clever country's contribution to this global technology behemoth's operations are two measly support centres in Sydney's North Ryde and Melbourne's Scoresby. Oh, of course there are also the sales offices located in the main population centres, which together with the support centres, employ a total of 300 staff in Australia. By comparison, the EMC facility in Ireland employs 1,600 technical, operational, engineering and professional staff.

Should we also mention that Intel Ireland, operating since 1990, includes two advanced chip fabrication facilities located in Leixlip and Shannon. Intel Ireland, operating since 1990, employs 3200 highly skilled people, is a major source for the manufacture of high speed Pentium 4 support chips and the latest flash technology using leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing processes. Intel Israel has six locations which, include design and development centers and fabrication plants, employing in total 5200 people. Intel Australia, operating since 1979, includes two sales and marketing offices, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne and employs a grand total of 50 people.

When pressed as to why the high-tech giants of the world don't want to do clever things in our wonderfully clever country, EMC's Clive Gold responds frankly: 'What has Australia done to build the right environment? Where are the Government incentives and tax breaks? In a rapidly moving industry, you need to have vision and take a punt on creating the environment.'

Unfortunately, as we round the bend into the home stretch of the Federal election campaign, there is no evidence of such vision from either of the major parties. They are both correct that the key to our ICT future is to nurture our small high tech companies so that they grow into big companies. However, in the current environment, that isn't going to happen. What our politicians don't seem to understand, is that small technology satellites spring forth from large planets and often grow into large planets themselves. In the process, lots of high technology jobs are created, just like in Ireland and Israel, but sadly not in Australia, where we specialise in sales offices.