Philippine Shipping Toast

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Philippine Shipping Industry Not Ready for Y2K Xinhua English Newswire

The Philippine government said Monday that actions should have been taken earlier to help the country's shipping industry to solve the Year 2000 (Y2K) millennium bug or the Y2K problem.

The Y2K Readiness and Contingency Center (RCC) under the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) said it is still trying to assess the effects of the Y2K problem on the local shipping industry when the problem itself suggests organizations should already be at the final stages of their compliance efforts.

Reports by the Y2K-RCC stated that maritime agencies attached to the department showed low level of Y2K compliance.

As of June 14 this year, the Maritime Industry Authority has only completed 38 percent of their Y2K program; the Philippine Ports Authority, 78 percent; Cebu Ports Authority, 40 percent; and the Philippine Coast Guard, 27 percent.

There are five common stages for a Y2K compliance program, namely, awareness, assessment, renovation or remediation, testing and implementation.

The Y2K problem may affect navigation, communications, safety and security systems, ballasting and electrical systems of ships.

The DOTC created in May the Y2K-RCC, which focuses on three key clusters, namely, air and maritime, land and rail and telecommunications, to coordinate Y2K activities of all its sectoral offices and attached agencies.

-- Mike Lang (webflier@erols.com), July 12, 1999

Answers

I wonder what we import from them. Next year I'll wonder what we used to import from them.

-- Dog Gone (layinglow@rollover.now), July 13, 1999.

I'm just glad to find out we aren't importing toast from them, as the thread title implied.

-- Pearlie Sweetcake (storestuff@home.now), July 13, 1999.

The Phillipines is one of two primary global sources of refractory grade chrome ore used in making refractories for steelmaking, copper refining, coal gasification and other high temperature manufacturing processes. The other source is South Africa.

The chrome ore is critical in making magnesia-chrome refractories used to line steelmaking degassing vessels that make autobody sheet.

The Phillipines is also one of two or three sources for primary metallurgical grade chrome ore used in making stainless steel.

-- X (Not@this.now), July 13, 1999.


Don't get too short-sighted here. You can't (in a global economy) only ask - when seeing a report of potetnial failure of an island nation's only communication stream - what's in it for me?

The probable failure of this nation's shipping industry - even if not typical of Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, Japanese, Tawianese, South Korean, Singapore, and others - is in the continuation of the "asian flu" economic failures and further worsenig of thier trading capacity. Does it matter for example, if the Taiwanese company importing its goods to the US fails because of a first level y2k failure in Tawain such as no power, no internal shipping or infrastructure failure? Or a secondary failure such as no available customers in the Phillipines causes the company to go out of business?

Any such "predictor" of overseas problems like this report should be looked at the primary, secondary, and third-level impacts before you dismiss them. Look at it also as the "tip" of the iceberg affecting other countries who are also affected - rather than the icecube it appears to be.

-- Robert A Cook, PE (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), July 13, 1999.


Robert

Obviously this is a serious report, and indicates another place in the world-wide supply line that problems can be expected. It may also be ultimately irrelevant, because the BIS announced that the banking community was largely not testing the SWIFT system for international bank transfers. Even if the Philippines were completely ready in the transportation sector, it won't happen unless they could be paid for it.

There are so many ways for a global collapse to occur that it boggles the mind.

-- Dog Gone (layinglow@rollover.now), July 13, 1999.



Coming late to this post but stock up on coffee filters folks.Much of the World's manilla hemp comes from Manilla which is... yes in the Phillipines.

Paper Coffee filters & tea bag paper are made from manilla hemp.

-- Chris (griffen@globalnet.co.uk), July 13, 1999.


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