🚀 Faster, Please! — The Podcast #12

We’ve all heard the stories and statistics about the supposed death of American manufacturing. But America's industrial sector never truly went away. Many, many companies are thriving, and today's guest argues we're experiencing an outright renaissance. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I’m joined by Gaurav Batra, who previously co-led McKinsey & Company’s Advanced Electronics Practice in the Americas. Along with Asutosh Padhi and Nick Santhanam, he's the author of the new book, The Titanium Economy: How Industrial Technology Can Create a Better, Faster, Stronger America. This from the book: The Titanium Economy is the secret weapon of American industrial revival—the key to ensuring the country’s economic vitality as the Fourth Industrial Revolution progresses and we face steep competition from global rivals. The next few years will be critical, as the future growth of the Titanium Economy sector in the United States is far from assured. Investors, policy makers, and the public at large must appreciate the importance of providing more robust investment in these companies, as well as how their growth brings so many positive ripple effects for individuals and communities, providing more high-quality jobs and boosting the economic prosperity of communities and whole regions. So what is the Titanium Economy? Listen in to find out! In This Episode: * The US industrial renaissance (1:14) * The businesses of the Titanium Economy (7:48) * American industry and technology (12:29) * Workers in the US manufacturing sector (16:20) * Finding America’s next-generation industrial workers (21:26) Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. The US industrial renaissance James Pethokoukis: I think there's a caricature or perhaps a misperception about the US economy—I think you see it in the media—that the US economy is basically Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and big box stores. And that's basically your American economy, and it's certainly an economy that doesn't really make stuff in the physical world—with atoms—anymore. And the book, I think, is a corrective to that view. Why is that view wrong and, as you state, that the US is in the middle of an industrial renaissance? Gaurav Batra: Jim, you very accurately represented the perception of what's happened in the US economy over the last couple of decades. I think the story, whenever anybody tells it, is mostly about technology companies. It's mostly about financial services, mostly about Wall Street. As we started digging in, not just with the book but our work in the industrial sector, we realized that the reality is actually very disconnected with this perception. The reason we say that is, if you look at just pure numbers, still 20 percent of the US economy is completely dependent on US manufacturing. That number has not gone down. It may not have increased, but that number has sustained pretty well. If you look at employment, this sector still employs the bulk of the US economy's workers today. In terms of pure numbers, in terms of relevance, the sector never went away. It definitely slowed down because other sectors started growing, but manufacturing as a sector in the US still remained pretty staunch. That is at the sector level. As you unveil that a little bit and go under the hood, you realize that whenever we talk about Wall Street, we talk about the Facebooks, the Alphabets, the Apples of the world delivering incredible stock market growth. Everybody talks about how much of that you own in your portfolio. But the moment you start unraveling the industrial landscape, you actually see several—and the number is actually north of 20, 30—companies who have done actually fairly well over a much longer time period in terms of even delivering value to their shareholders. And these companies have done it not necessarily leveraging outsourcing, but they've done it by just strong, sensible business practices: how they run their companies internally, how they work with their customers, how they potentially create a niche for themselves in particular markets. For us, at least as we started (and I spent about a decade in this particular industry), as I looked at that perception, which was exactly what my idea was coming into the sector, versus what I took away from it after being a practitioner in the segment for about 10, 12 years: the perception and the reality don't match. I think the perception, as you rightly said, is all about Wall Street, all about technology, all about financial services. But the reality tells us that manufacturing has never gone away. Given what's happened over the last two years with the pandemic and the geopolitics of the globe around us, it is only telling us a flashing red [light] that this is actually going to get even more critical for all of us here in the US in the next couple of years. These are industrial companies. While they may not be classified as technology companies, they use technology. Consultants like talking about 5G and AI and cloud computing. But they're more than buzzwords. Those technologies are diffusing into the economy, and not just at places like Google or Amazon or Apple. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think what we're seeing in this industrial sector is these technologies are part of how they do what they do. Absolutely right. We think it's an essential ingredient to success going forward. To give you one example, there's a company called Bulk Handling Systems. It's based in Eugene, Oregon. They basically are recycling cardboard, cans, and plastic. Essentially stuff which has food in them. I think if you looked at them a decade earlier, they would tell you about all the manual processes, which is fairly unhygienic, about how somebody would have to pull that piece of food out of a cardboard can or a plastic can, and then put it in the recycling. Today, if you look at that company, it's using artificial intelligence, it's using latest-version technologies, it's using robots to find where these sediments are, getting them off the cardboard can and the plastics, and then essentially putting them through recycling. That's a very tangible example of how technology and the progress we've made there is really impacting the industrial landscape—and for the good. I think while this one might be on a production line—there are several others about how people are using similar techniques to ensure quality and efficiency on the production line—technology actually is also making these companies go to the next level of performance on pure, I would say, business processes. To give you another example, a place where I've seen technology help a lot of such companies is pricing. A lot of these companies create a lot of complicated engineering equipment. Equipment could be a boiler or a heat exchanger or a mixer for a food processing plant. It's not a standard thing you can buy off of Amazon. There's a lot of specifications going into it: temperature controls, material composition, process tolerances. People used to do all that work manually, in terms of negotiating with the customers, letting them design those kind of products. Today, they can go to a website. There's an electronic configurator, you can click and choose what kind of parameters it wants and it gives you a right outcome. And then similarly, it quickly tells you how much it's going to cost. A process which would have taken multiple weeks, in some cases months as well, is now getting compressed to a matter of days. I think technology will get pervasive. And the good part is, I think there's a very good fusion between what our industrial landscape does and what technology can provide to them to really make them go to the next level of performance, both in terms of meeting customer needs and satisfaction, and then, candidly, being much more robust [financially]. The businesses of the Titanium Economy In those two examples, you've given two very different kinds of businesses. And in the book, you really give a sense of the span of t… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe