TORONTO: Punjab-born Joginder Singh, vice president of finance for Ford Motor Company of Canada, says India and China are the new frontiers for the automobile industry and manufacturers in North America ignore them at their own peril. "Ford's involvement in India is going to increase dramatically," Singh, who completes 23 years with Ford this week and has been in senior management positions in Europe and the U.S. as well, told IANS in an interview. "In fact, we are exporting from India for the Ikon car. We also have been trying to indigenise the power-train part of our engines so we can localise the production. We are also trying to expand our product line-up." And on the service side of the business, Singh points to the Ford IT centre in Chennai, which makes business low cost. "We have also been transferring a lot of accounting to India. There's a lot of opportunity in that area." Singh, who was born in Ferozepur, Punjab, and brought up in Dehradun, says, "We can't ignore either China or India which are projected to be so huge that it would be dangerous to look only at one of them. They are showing the highest growth rate of any market in the world. Any automaker would be on a fool's errand if it ignores any of them." The automotive industry is a very cyclical industry. But today, he says, "There is a different dynamic in the marketplace - there are a lot of incentives, and the Japanese and the Koreans have made great inroads in this market that was dominated by the three biggies - GM, Ford and Chrysler. So it is much more of a global industry." Outsourcing, Singh notes, is a part of this bid to acquire a leaner-meaner company, but on a different scale. "China and India are low cost outsourcing for us, but we still work in high cost areas like the U.S. What would make sense is not just outsourcing key-punching work but a bigger deal, like re-sourcing whole production plants and also re-sourcing the supply base. "Two-thirds of a car is built from suppliers - that's a big cost item -- and to the extent you can find that in places like India and China" the company can cut costs. Of Singh's 23 years with Ford, 14 were spent in England, seven in the U.S. and the last two in Canada. He continues to maintain homes in both the U.S. and Canada. He is also president of the Ford Asian Indian Association and is on the board of Ford Motor Company of Canada. Indian Americans are the second largest ethnic group employed in Ford in North America, numbering some 2,400. Singh says Indians at Ford have done well. "The fact that we have stability in our family lives, educational basis, we work hard -- it all comes to good in the end." He says he was most influenced by his mother's education ethics. "When I talk of working with young people, I see these qualities in them but I see gaps as well - the gaps are on the soft skills side. He defines these as "how you dress for success, how you communicate, work in teams, how you use your diversity to your advantage, how do you display courage in a corporate environment, how do you drive for results." He plans to start a mentoring program in Michigan, U.S., to teach those skills, he said. He won an engineering apprenticeship scholarship sponsored by the Government of India and Rolls Royce, and got his Mechanical Engineering degree from Imperial College, London and subsequently switched to finance, doing an MBA from Manchester Business School, England. "The day I landed in England - the four of us (students) had a Scottish landlady. She was wonderful and mothered us. But there was a lot of racism (in England) at that time, and trying to maintain your value system and identity and culture at a very young age was a real challenge. I believe more in talking to people about it - not confront it or taking a legal way out of it," Singh says. He cultivates that attitude and it seems to have served him well. Singh and his wife Ragina, have a son, Sumeet, 16, and a daughter Jasmine, 14. Before joining Ford, Singh worked for the engineering group GKN (Guest Keene Nettlefold) in England, Hindustan Aeronautics in India, and Rolls Royce in England.
Source: IANS