Commerce Circle

A great day out at the Tropica golf course in Malaysia with a great company and real nice friends. Emerio is a company with about 1500 people in the South East Asian region and they are a great lead in to being the regional outsourcers outsourcer. Harish Nim, the CEO is a celebrity in his own rights in the region, and the chairman Bobby Choonavala is an IT icon for the past half century in the Asia Pacific region. Many thanks to my team mates Nasa (Yellow Pages) and Jon (T-Systems) for creating great focus to win on the day.

I had the pleasure of spending a few days last week in Kuwait for business. In sweltering heat approaching 50 degrees Celsius, I was glad there was lots of air conditioning everywhere. Nearly got in trouble at the airport when I had to pay for a visa on arrival in local currency, and found out the banks at the airport wouldn’t change Singapore or Malaysian money, lucky I had some left over Sri Lanka currency to bail me out. Must make it a mandatory point to convert and carry some US or Euros in future. People I deal with were absolutely delightful. Very pleasant and easy to work with and very hospitable. The Ramadan month made things more interesting with the changes in preferred working hours, was getting into the office around midday and getting out before the break-fast period. This was great to get over the 5 hour time zone difference from Singapore (though it killed me on the way back). The late night supper meetings close to midnight that are quite typical during the fasting month were an interesting change. One of these meetings took place at The Avenues mall, one of the largest malls in the middle east, easily a couple of kms walk either way. And where ever I went, was quite hard to miss the Kuwait Towers, a set of three towers rising up to 187 metres serving as water towers. Definitely looking forward to my next trip there.

In March 2009, the Malaysian and Singapore governments announced an outsourcing collaboration pact to address regional and global markets together. The parties represented were from the National ICT Association of Malaysia (Pikom), Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation (SITF) and Singapore Business Federation (SBF).

The goal was to help provide a platform to match make Singapore and Malaysian outsource companies to leverage of each other competencies and advantages, so together these two countries can go after larger global outsource opportunities.

In the photo with me are David Wong (Pikom chairman) and Charles Fan (SITF Sourcing Chairman). Click on the photo to see the press release.

We had a pleasant university alumni get together in Singapore in March 2009. Jim Bolger the former New Zealand prime minister joined us in his capacity as the current University of Waikato chancellor together with the vice chancellor and president Profession Roy Crawford. Our gracious hosts were Martin Harvey, the New Zealand High Commissioner to Singapore and his wife Sarah. There are over 300 ex University of Waikato students in Singapore and many more through out Asia. If you are an alumni member, there is a central alumni site for Asia which I moderate at http://waikato-u-alumni-singapore.collectivex.com/

St George’s is the church that we go to in Singapore. The community comprises members from Singapore and many other countries, including Africa, America, Australia, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, UK and other parts of Europe and Asia. A real melting pot of cultures and friendship in the heart of Singapore.