IT is the pivot for global economic shift: Vincente Fox

In July, UST Global, a mid-sized provider of IT solutions and services based in Aliso Viejo in the US, announced its entry into the Latin American market.

The company has tied up with Centro Fox, the presidential library and learning centre in Mexico dedicated to leadership development in Latin America.

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox visited the US headquarters of UST Global to announce the agreement. The partnership will expand UST Global’s footprint to support Latin American operations of global enterprises as well as local organisations based in the region.

Apart from Thiruvananthapuram, the company has offices in Chennai and Bangalore.

Vincente Fox was in Thiruvananthapuram recently to acclimatise himself with the latest on IT. He says IT is the pivot around which the transformation of the global economy will take place.

The best is yet to come, Fox told Business Line during his stay in Thiruvananthapuram. Sajan Pillai, chief executive officer of UST Global, was by his side.

Here are edited excerpts from the interview with Vicente Fox:

Context of the tie-up with UST Global

I travel around the world, do a lot of conferences through which I raise money for the library which is a non-profit, non-partisan, non-religious institution.

Mexico is strong in manufacturing, in fact the largest player in all of Latin America by far. Its competitiveness stems from North American Free trade Agreement and association with the US and Canadian economies. Today, engineering designing and all other activities in the manufacturing industry is being carried on in Mexico. US corporations have moved in engineering designing activity into the country.

The way forward

Manufacture and shipping of a product from Mexico to the US happens in cycles of 24 hours, which no other country can hope to beat. There is now a need for Mexico to move from manufacturing into IT and high technology and a knowledge economy.

What better learning to inspire us than from India and UST Global which has been pioneer in handling situations critical in employing power of IT to move entire economy. That’s what led us to sit down and explore how we could work together.

‘Not for profit; the aim is to serve Mexico’

We are not looking for profit, says Vicente Fox on the tie-up with UST Global.

Serve Mexico, its economy and redeem its poor – this is going to be the vision that will drive it. The objective is to benefit from and share the compassion and commitment with Centro Fox.

Our main is to foster leadership among the youth, because change is what keeps evolving the world.

We’re already on the go. We’ve set up infrastructure at Centre Fox to host the first engineers and employees of knowledge.

On type of relationship

There’s a lot of wrong thinking on whether agreement among nations make them compete with each other to go out of contention.

Nothing could be farther from truth. It is a win-win situation for all, as each benefit from the other through varied linkages.

It’s this type of a relationship that UST Global and Centro Fox are looking to build between the knowledge economies of India and Mexico.

Mexico has about 25 large global corporations. With the type of linkages that I’ve in mind, I’m convinced we’ll be able to take that number to almost the double.

New instrument

It will take IT to improve competitiveness of the knowledge economy.

This rings true in the case of US corporations which are in a recession, especially if they want to cut costs and improve competitiveness.

So what we at UST Global and Centre Fox is to make these corporations learn about IT as an instrument to create wealth, combat poverty and increase human capital.