Death toll of a trading company

I foresee that the future of trading companies will end with the advent of Internet commerce.

I worked in a Japanese trading company for 22 years. We sold all sorts of Japanese goods to Indonesia -- printing machines, stationery, cigarette paper and so on.

Our head office in Tokyo handled the sale of plywood and other wooden materials -- such as particle board -- on behalf of their clients in Indonesia. In other words, it was two-way trading. As a matter of fact, we (the company) acted as a broker for the sellers and buyers in Indonesia, for which we received a certain percentage of the profits.

Alas, this will soon have to end. With the explosion of the Internet, buyers can now contact their Japanese sellers via e- mail and bargain/negotiate at will. Likewise, Indonesia plywood and particle board producers can merely switch on their computers and look for buyers online, not only in Japan but in other countries of the world as well.

No wonder our Tokyo head office laid off 100 employees. Business was bad. Unfortunately, I too was laid off, four years before I was scheduled to retire.

Unemployment is not experienced by Indonesia alone; globalization in all its segments is now in full swing.

Japanese consumers of wood products do not need the service of a trading company any longer. They contact directly the Indonesian suppliers of plywood, particle board, pulp and so on online. As stated by Newsweek in its April 17 edition: An Internet revolution is reshaping the economic landscape".

So modernization implies the increase of unemployment. Local television shows often present motor car factories where all the assembling of the parts is done wholly by robots. Modern technology is both a bane and a blessing to humankind.

A. DJUANA

Jakarta