PRODUCTION SKILLS

Earlier this year, I found myself walking through a cluster of handmade glass factories in China’s Shanxi Province. Like most manufacturing visits, I expected to return with photographs of impressive machinery and pages of technical notes. Instead, I came back thinking about a conversation that lasted less than five minutes.

The factories themselves were not what I had expected. They were well organised and efficient, but they were not filled with futuristic robots or revolutionary production technology. In fact, anyone expecting to see the latest industrial automation might have left slightly disappointed.

Yet these factories had achieved something remarkable. Spread across the region were roughly one hundred factories, many of them family-owned, collectively exporting handmade glassware worth well over a billion dollars each year to customers across Europe, North America and elsewhere. Their products were sold in some of the world’s most demanding markets, where quality standards leave very little room for error.

As I watched craftsmen shape molten glass with movements that looked almost effortless, I asked one factory owner a question: “What proportion of your manufacturing cost is labour?” His answer was immediate: “Around 70 per cent”.

As someone who has spent most of his career in manufacturing in Pakistan, that answer immediately caught my attention. We often describe Pakistan’s relatively low labour costs as one of our greatest competitive advantages. If labour represented such a large share of production cost, this appeared to be exactly the type of industry where Pakistan should be able to compete.

So I asked him one more question: “How long does it take before a new worker can consistently produce products that meet export quality?” He smiled before replying: “Five to seven years”. Not months. Years.

That answer stayed with me long after I left the factory. On the flight back home, I realised I had spent years thinking about manufacturing in terms of machines, buildings, energy prices and financing. Those things matter, of course. But they are only part of the story.

The real competitive advantage inside those factories was not the furnace standing in the middle of the workshop. It was the people standing around it.

If someone copied every piece of equipment in those factories and built an identical facility somewhere else, they still would not have created a competitor overnight. What they would be missing is the one thing that cannot simply be purchased: years of accumulated knowledge.

That made me think about something we rarely discuss in Pakistan -- deep technical skills. Whenever industrial policy is debated, the conversation usually revolves around electricity tariffs, taxes, exchange rates, financing costs or incentives. All of these issues deserve attention. Manufacturers deal with them every day.

Countries do not become manufacturing powers simply because wages are low or because governments announce incentives. They become manufacturing powers because, over many years, they accumulate knowledge that is difficult to copy

But perhaps we spend too little time discussing the one ingredient that takes the longest to build: skills that require years, not weeks, to master. The ability to produce consistently. The judgement that comes only after making thousands of products. The instinct to recognise a defect before anyone else notices it. The discipline to achieve the same quality every single day.

These capabilities rarely make headlines, yet they are often what separate countries that manufacture for themselves from countries that manufacture for the world.

One lesson stood out during my visit. Successful manufacturing clusters are not built only through investment in factories. They are built through investment in people. Experienced workers train apprentices. Knowledge passes from one generation to the next. Suppliers improve alongside manufacturers. Over time, skills spread across an entire region. Eventually, a cluster develops a reputation that competitors find difficult to replicate.

Pakistan has witnessed this process before.

Sialkot’s surgical instruments industry did not emerge overnight. Neither did its football manufacturing sector. These industries became globally recognised because thousands of workers steadily refined their craft over decades. International buyers returned not simply because products were competitively priced, but because they trusted the skills behind those products.

That distinction matters. Too often, we speak about cheap labour as though it is a competitive strategy in itself. It is not. If low wages alone created industrial success, many of the world’s poorest countries would already dominate global exports.

Competitive manufacturing is built when affordable labour is combined with deep expertise, disciplined production systems and an obsession with quality.

Perhaps that is where Pakistan’s greatest opportunity lies. We are rightly proud of having one of the youngest populations in the world. Every year, millions of young Pakistanis enter the workforce. We frequently describe this as our demographic dividend.

But a young population is not an economic advantage by itself. Young people become an advantage only when they develop skills that become more valuable with experience. That requires patience. It also requires a different way of thinking.

Governments often look for policies that produce visible results within a few years. Businesses, too, sometimes hesitate to invest heavily in training because the returns are neither immediate nor guaranteed.

Yet almost every country that has built internationally competitive manufacturing industries has made precisely that long-term investment.

The government’s role is not to create successful industries by itself. Its role is to create conditions where skill development becomes worthwhile: strong technical education, meaningful apprenticeship programmes, close collaboration between industry and vocational institutions, and policy stability that gives businesses confidence to invest for the long term.

The private sector carries an equally important responsibility. Training should not be viewed simply as an expense on the income statement. It is an investment in productive capacity. Companies that consistently invest in developing skilled people often discover that those people become their greatest competitive advantage.

I do not know whether handmade glass is the right industry for Pakistan. It may be, or it may not be. But I left Shanxi convinced of something much broader: countries do not become manufacturing powers simply because wages are low or because governments announce incentives. They become manufacturing powers because, over many years, they accumulate knowledge that is difficult to copy.

Factories can be built in a few years. Machinery can be imported in a few months. Capital can be raised when conditions are right.

But deep production skills are different. They are earned patiently, one worker at a time, over many years. If Pakistan is serious about expanding its manufacturing base and becoming a more competitive exporting nation, perhaps that is where the conversation should begin.

The writer is the director of Tariq Glass Industries Ltd.