Auto suppliers buzzing about Ford-Daewoo deal
The high-glitz reception in Zacheta restaurant's back room last week was intended to be for the new auto-research center proposed by Israeli investors and university academics.
But the buzz among the 40-50 suppliers centered on something else entirely during the pre-program drinking and munching.
It was about the newly sealed deal by Ford Motor International to buy Korea's Daewoo. For obvious reasons, these folks were interested. Ford has been phasing out its assembly operation here but snapping up Daewoo probably gives it a new lease on life in Poland.
"I like it!" said an exuberant Leszek Waliszewski, head of Delphi Poland, which has five plants and more than 4,000 employees making a broad assortment of equipment for the automotive industry.
Delphi is now a stand-alone corporation after separating from General Motors (GM) more than a year ago. Waliszewski, a one-time Solidarity organizer in the 1980s who was jailed and then "exported" to the United States where he found a cutting-edge berth in the Saturn auto plant, came back to Poland in the mid-1990s when Delphi was still with GM. But this isn't a time for undue loyalty.
"If GM had bought Daewoo, and they already own Fiat, it probably would have been one customer in Poland (for auto parts)," Waliszewski said. "So with Ford buying it, it will mean more business."
And that burgeoning auto manufacturing business here is the motivating factor behind the idea for what is tentatively called BIM, the Automotive Research Institute.
Michael Traison of the Detroit-based Miller, Canfield law firm is the midwife. He put Polish, Israeli and U.S. auto industry executives and nuts-and-bolts engineers together at last year's Society of Automotive Engineers. Out of that came the germ of the idea to create an organization that could draw on Israeli's high-tech software sector, which has more than 200 companies producing for the global automotive market, along with the growing skills and contacts of the Polish auto industry and suppliers. Those who are targets for cooperation include Polish and foreign manufacturers, research institutions and anyone else linked to Poland's fast-expanding auto industry.
The homegrown suppliers are facing the need to rapidly accommodate themselves to the demands of multinational producers. Some Polish engineering and mechanical research associations are already in place. Delphi is building its own software research center in Krakow and moving its country headquarters from Warsaw to Krakow later this summer.
The get together was promoted by the Economy Ministry's Bernard Blaszczyk, who didn't actually attend. In his place was Janusz Kipigroch. Others who spoke included the Israeli Embassy's commercial attache, Shai Aizen, and Antoni Dabrowski of the Engineers and Technicians and Mechanics Association. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev also was a project participant.
Adam Szostkiewicz has been a fixture at the weekly newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny in Krakow for decades. He's been one of their political analysts and writers. So it is a shock to see that he's now deputy foreign editor at Polityka, and moving permanently, it seems, to Warsaw.
Among those dropping by the Democracy Forum: Krzysztof Szala, president of the B.K. Euromed's Warsaw International Community Clinic. He has his clinic in Reform Plaza, the site of the three-day democracy do.
Lots of Varsovians got their first inside look at the soaring blue-and-white skyscraper. The conference guests almost outnumbered the building tenants. The high-zloty, high-fashion shops on the fourth and fifth floors sorely lack customers.
The food court on the fifth floor was getting customers, but confusing some of them, too. The Canadian Embassy, which has moved into Reform Plaza while its new embassy is under constrution, has hundreds of visa applicants daily. And the embassy itself more than 50 staffers. But recently there was a minor skirmish over a bill that involved a Polish staffer of the Canadian embassy, a Polish waitress in the food court and her Turkish boss who had upped the price of one of the tasty entrees from the listed zl. 19 to zl. 25. He didn't tell anyone beforehand, and it was left to the waitress to deliver the bad news.
It got a bit messy, according to an embassy big shot. Ultimately, after lots of back-and-forthing, the waitress accepted the lower number of zlotys.
What's wrong with just raising the price on the board so there's no confusion and no two-way berating of waiters?
It's coming hard on the final days for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which put a billion dollars into Poland in the past 10 years.
In some other countries, USAID left earlier. In the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus showed them the door, along with all other multinational lending and advisory agencies. The Czechs could do it by themselves, he told them in 1996. Which may partly explain why their central bank seems to founder, right now, in the midst of yet another mega-bank failure. The collapse involves the usual allegations of "tunneling out" of assets as well as just plain inept management of the portfolio of indebted state-owned companies that the banks got from the early-1990s' voucher privatization program.
At the July 4 bash at the U.S. ambassador's residence last week, USAID director William M. Frej was taking plenty of handshakes from well-wishers. And lots of comments and an occasional thank-ya-kindly, too.
The operation officially closes with ceremonies at Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek's office Wednesday and various meetings and receptions early this week.
