Economic Crisis Yet Again?

All eyes are on Euro Zone crisis. If the dangling Greece debt turmoil could not find its way out which seems quite likely, the crisis which has been plaguing the Euro Zone could be spiralling as an enormous hurricane that would hit the world's economy anytime soon. This pessimist analysis by some experts masks the world's economy with a layer of dark clouds.

Belt tighten during downturn?

When some companies look out the window, frown at the gloomy skies and decide to cut costs to prepare for their years ahead, thankfully our plans for next year would not be affected.

We have hired more programmers to speed up our research and development works; aggressively preparing for new software and hardware products for the coming years. We continue to recruit a few more technicians and we have extended the support hours to include midnight to early morning, and with this decision, we have reduced the gap of 'support staff unavailable online' to three hours a day, and prolonged the technical assistance to 19 hours per day.

If the sky is gloomy, it's alright, have your umbrella ready. We are not immune from the economic slowdown. When the subprime crisis hit in 2009, our turnover was recorded only slight increase as compared to the previous year, but while being prudent we carried out all activities like normal and we didn't even cut the annual trip to Shanghai.

This year, as usual, our staff who receive an incentive trip to Gold Coast, Australia is about to depart this evening. On advertising and promotion, we just signed up for advertisement packages on two prominent security magazines, A&S International and Detektor International for the whole of next year, and we plan to take part in more than ten tradeshows worldwide.

More new products are in our pipeline, with one particular 7-inch touch screen new iKiosk that runs on Android platform to excite everybody and I. This would mark a new milestone to our product line, because besides the bundling of standard applications, customers can now have more control of their own terminals, and download Apps they feel useful from the Google Android Apps Store. It would serve as an amazing administration kiosk that does multiple purposes for office environment.

Artist impression for our upcoming new iKiosk

When you are a start up company, struggle is normal even during the economic booming years. But for established companies, if you are only making good money during good times and losing money, having to cut costs and retrench workers during bad times, then I don't think you are competent enough companies.

To continue making money during bad times, a company should take various aspects other than only sales figures into account during good times. Instead of focusing on only sales growth, one should think of its biological growth as well. Without one holistic perspective, your business field may remain barren even during the harvest season.


by Teh Hon Seng, CEO, FingerTec HQ