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HONG KONG MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY IN THE SIXTIES
are now some 32,200 employees engaged in making electronic components of great variety and finished assemblies incorporating many of them. Other industries which have, particularly in the last few years, substantially increased their share of the total export market (but which in terms of value do not compare with the ones mentioned above) are those manufacturing watch cases and bands, and cameras. As with the electronic industry, these are relatively labour-intensive but also technologically oriented; they are therefore important in terms of Hong Kong's ability to move into industries technically more advanced than those which formed the rungs of the ladder of industrialisation.
There have come about great changes in the shape and size of manufacturing industry. Nobody in the previous decade could have predicted the rise of the plastic flower industry; nobody in the early stages of this decade could have predicted the remarkable growth of the wig industry. The growth of the electronics industry was perhaps foreseeable from the first, although it would have taken a bold imagination to have predicted the scale and range of equipment produced. The great diversification of the sixties has on the whole been responsive, not deliberately conceived in Hong Kong's boardrooms or few research laboratories. It has been achieved within those quite narrowly defined industrial sectors which Hong Kong is best suited to exploit, for instance leather footwear has given place to plastic or rubber sandals and a great variety of slippers and shoes made from cloth uppers. But the most notable achievement undoubtedly remains that, in spite of inevitable vicis- situdes, the value of output has increased four times in 10 years, from a very substantial base.
SIGNIFICANT EVENTS
This has been accomplished against a background of dramatic events, many of which, although usually of a transitory nature, had an impact on the development of manufacturing industry. The influence of textile restraints has already been referred to; their impact has not been wholly unfortunate and it has been possible to make a virtue of necessity. Another event of a somewhat similar nature was the sudden influx of an estimated 142,000 refugees from across the border in April and May 1962, absorbed into the