The sky is falling?

World news is getting depressing.

Peace is getting harder to come by. Israel and Palestine still continue to have a go at each other. The Irish-British peace accord has collapsed. America and China still have their spy planes to talk about. India and Pakistan are trying to talk but can’t agree. The Abu Sayyaf still has a complimentary season ticket to all the luxury island resorts in the ASEAN.

Economic news is not that much better. Despite the Fed rate cuts and the tax cuts in the US, the earnings numbers of US tech companies still reflect the overbuilding of capacity (specially for fiber networks like Quest and L3 and telcos) and oversupply of inventory. There will be continued reduction in capital equipment as well as supply.

Asia is hardest-hit because it supplies most of the PCs, chips and equipment globally. Japan and Europe have declining populations and therefore, declining market demand; they continue to have economies that need structural reform.

A friend of mine suggested that most of the growth in the short term would have to come from consumers in the US. But consumer debt (i.e. credit card) continues to rise as a percentage of a household’s take-home, which is another red flag.

In the Philippines, approximately 32 percent of the people, or 27 million, are still under the poverty line (1997 figures from a Think Tank study). This, of course, could have increased again from the previous administration. Sustainable economic growth is the main answer to poverty reduction.

There must be a silver lining somewhere. There is...China. They still have a way to go as far as human rights are concerned. Rumor has it they will still put you in jail before a fair trial or rather shoot first and prosecute later. But think about it, with 1.2 billion people and the 2008 Olympics, the run-up in infrastructure- and consumer-spending leading to the year 2008 will be a major driver for the Chinese economy; there has to be a domino effect in the rest of the world, at the minimum, in Asia.

Is there a silver lining for the Philippines? Yes, tourism and I.T.

I met a major German tour operator during my trip abroad. He said tourists have a short-term memory. When Cairo was bombed four or five years ago, German tourists numbered 130,000. It recovered in two years to about 140,000. When we get our act together and get the kidnapping industry under control, then we would be able to sell the Philippines again. Just imagine close to 70 percent of Germans travel every year because they are given at least six weeks of vacation. Surely, a small slice of that can go consistently to the Philippines (key word is consistently). Another twist is that we can serve the tourist market year-round as opposed to the five months that they have in Greece.

For your information, although I enjoyed myself in Mykonos, their beaches were way below par vis-a-vis our Palawan shores, not to mention that their water is freezing cold.

In business terms, this means we have to work harder in packaging, marketing and promoting our product. (Someone at the DOT can e-mail me if they are interested to contact this German.) Maybe Cebu Pacific can take a shot at doing a Frankfurt-Cebu direct flight?

For I.T., US companies continue to see the Philippines as a good complement to India for call centers. A couple of thousand seats are still up for grabs by our local call center players. As companies in the US still look for belt-tightening strategies, the Philippines is still a good source for cheap but good programming talent and services.

My Two Cents: The world is round and will turn around. In the meantime, keep liquid as it will get worse before it gets better.

Laptop-free vacation but not gadget-free

I went to Europe on leave last month. The one mandate (from my wife) was that I leave my laptop at home. This was a challenge, as my life is tethered to my laptop. Political correctness requires that I tell you I was miserable, but I actually had a good time.

What did I do? I made sure all outstanding projects were handed off/delegated to my partners to handle and watch. This reduced the day-to-day correspondence to the most critical ones. But best-laid plans of mice and men...Murphy’s law still came to visit.

Cell phone. I brought my Smart cell phone with text. Since I was not about to pay for the global roaming charges of my friends who called to say hello, I diverted all my voice calls to my secretary. She would then text or e-mail to me the calls for the day. I kept the text function open to receive text. (Then again, I have not seen the bill on the text side.)

E-mail. I forwarded my work and home e-mail to Yahoo so I could read and keep up with the incoming messages as the vacation progressed, and not be overwhelmed when I got back. Lucky for me, most of the hotels we stayed at had free Internet access; if there was a charge, it was less than $1 an hour. I even had free access at the Hong Kong airport.

Unfortunately, I must not have turned something on. Because when I got back, I had 1,700 messages in my inbox. (What to do...oops, hard disk crash?)

Palm Pilot. I brought my Palm because the itinerary my wife arranged had a few cities lined up for fun bordering on the hectic. So keeping a lid on the planes, trains and automobiles kept the stress level down. I also had the contact numbers of my friends in Europe.

Other gadgets. Of course, a vacation could not be memorable if we did not have photos, so we brought along our Olympus digital camera and my Sony camcorder.

I would say all these gadgets and their chargers and adaptors added up to quite a load, fortunately not enough to get charged for excess weight. (But I sure did put on a lot of weight.)

My Two Cents: There is life without laptop, but definitely not gadget-free. The text messaging and webmail access worked really well, though I had a hard time reading attachments. (Of course, I said that so I can throw it back to the sender.)