Ten important variables are considered in Deloitte Touche survey of global manufacturing competitiveness.

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (Deloitte) and the U.S. Council of Competitiveness have partnered together to conduct a multi-year project aimed at measuring the global manufacturing competitiveness of a sampling of the world’s top 38 economies.

Deloitte, and its partner, last surveyed five hundred and fifty executives of its client companies located in all corners of the globe back in 2013. While close to forty percent of the respondents were C-Level executives based in North America, nearly twenty-nine percent represented Asian firms, just over twenty percent were located in Europe and the remaining eleven percent were evenly divided between South America and Australia, Deloitte and its partner sought not only to get their feedback not only on present national manufacturing competitiveness, but their collective opinion as to the countries’ competitiveness five years into the future.

For purposes of the survey, global manufacturing competitiveness was measured by Deloitte on the basis of the following ten variables:

According to the 2013 global manufacturing competitiveness survey, executives ranked Mexico in the top thirty-one percent of a total of thirty-eight countries examined. The countries that ranked higher than Mexico in the results included, least competitive first:

  • Thailand
  • Japan
  • Singapore
  • Brazil
  • Canada
  • Taiwan
  • South Korea
  • India
  • United States of America
  • Germany
  • China

The executives surveyed projected into the future and predicted that Mexico’s global manufacturing competitiveness will rank thirteenth in 2018. According to the results of the Deloitte survey the top 15 countries in the world in terms of global manufacturing competitiveness three years from now, taking the above listed ten variables into account, will be as follows. (Countries are listed beginning with the most competitive):

  • China
  • India
  • Brazil
  • Germany
  • United States
  • South Korea
  • Taiwan
  • Canada
  • Singapore
  • Vietnam
  • Indonesia
  • Japan
  • Mexico
  • Malaysia
  • Thailand

In addition to Deloitte surveyed executives predicting a one position drop in global manufacturing competitiveness for Mexico, they also foresee that the United States will drop from third position to fifth position, and that three of the BRIC nations (China, India and Brazil) will occupy the top three most competitive positions. Also worthy of note is the prediction that Vietnam will move into the tenth position in terms of global manufacturing competitiveness. In 2013, C-level executives ranked the developing nation in the eighteenth position.

When looking at Mexico’s ranking in the Deloitte survey, it is important to note that final positions were arrived at taking all of the ten previously mentioned variables into account. In an upcoming post, we will examine each one of those variables and examine what Mexico is proactively doing with respect to each in an effort to raise its global manufacturing competitiveness.