Hello Adam, These are contructive suggestions. Thumbs up! It is obvious that you are "in the fray".
However, there is the education issue to consider. Most people in Asia wouldn't know a mortgage from a lease or a secured bank loan from an overdraft. The option for an average Joe to get a $ denominated loan simply does not exist and even in countries with more sophisticated banking services, unless you are upper management or a government employee, you won't even get a basic overdraft facility, no matter how impressive your cash flow. Credit card for a self-eplyed operator? No way. The mere thought to borrow the cash to go elsewhere to get a loan? Nada! Imagine the picture of a Filipino on tourist visa with some polaroid shots of 10 men factories and an order letter from overseas walking into Chase Manhattan in L.A. and asking for a loan :o))) The highest profit margins and the best ventures are really in the realm of the small fry. A guy that has basic maths, jobbed around an American air base and now ships Philippine handicrafts to Canada and the UK. Getting a bank loan didn't appear to him for the first few years, while he was driving an old battered car across islands buying local crafts for pennies and trying to entice the rural populace to produce higher volume. Every three months he shipped a whole container, with a neighbourhood loan shark footing the shipping bill and pocketing half the revenue in return [ie. making about 500% on his outlay]. The guy himself was absolutely satisfied. After all, he spent a few hundered dollars to source the goods to fill a container and got ten thousand back in net profit. Trouble was, we knew nothing about shipping - the loan shark did. Or insurance, or quarantine, or import regulations or any of those things. All he could think of was how to get the producers to carve and weave faster. The plastics guy is a bit more advanced, was overseas a couple of times, but the banks still turned him down. I know it's insane and drives me nuts, but a bank won't give him a loan unless he has sufficient property to secure the loan. Cash flow? Of course. If he can't show that he'll be able to pay the loan back many times over in no time flat then he needs to come up with 500% collateral. It really is that bad in rural Asia. By the way, he was never a plastics manufacturer, always an exporter. In previous posts I always referred to him as the guy who would source the items from a multitude of suppliers and ship tem at an immense profit. And he certainly is not alone. Trade is the favorite past time in Asia and every unemployed is a business man. > > Successful businesses do not maintain high interest-rate debt for long, > because they don't need to. Only the incompetent and the fraudulent. > I agree to the incompetent part in so far that many a successful business operator lacks the education we take for granted. But the lack of financial infrastructure is just as important. Only now are governments starting to lean on banks to offer loans to small stake holders, rural operators, etc. But those loans are capped at $2,500 for someone who can proof past success... It'll be years until the environment that most here in the list take as a given will be available in many Asian countries. And Africa is a different matter altogether. Cheers, Robert. budget & privacy website hosting http://www.cyberica.net budget & privacy domain registrations http://www.u2planet.com --- You are currently subscribed to e-gold-list as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Use e-gold's Secure Randomized Keyboard (SRK) when accessing your e-gold account(s) via the web and shopping cart interfaces to help thwart keystroke loggers and common viruses.
