Good afternoon. I want to thank you for your invitation to present today on behalf of my company, ABB Canada, on your study of the steel industry's competitive impact in competing globally.
I'm the VP of public affairs and corporate communications for ABB. The focus of my presentation today is about people, technology, and the future of the innovation ecosystem in Canada.
I'm a Canadian born of immigrants who fled war and poverty in post-war Europe. Most of my family worked in Canadian-owned factories in Quebec and Ontario in industrial manufacturing and cement. I'm the first of my extended family to graduate from university.
For the benefit of committee members, I will note that ABB is a global company headquartered in Zurich. It was born of the merger of a Swedish company, ASEA, and a Swiss company, Brown Boveri, that had a legacy footprint in Canada through electric systems and automation for pulp and paper mills. In Canada, we are 4,000 Canadians who are power and automation experts. We're in over 50 locations from coast to coast.
We are Canada's leading technology supplier for electrification, whether it's high-voltage direct current systems for companies such as Hydro-Québec or the Maritime link project. We also supply equipment such as the largest mining hoist in the world for PotashCorp in Saskatchewan. We provide electrification systems for the power supply for pipelines for oil and gas.
We are also into robotics and automation for manufacturing, which is part of the scope of my presentation today. It's this automation story that I think is key to the reshoring of jobs for the Canadian economy.
We have customers in the steel industry in Canada, the U.S., and globally. I will not speak to steel manufacturing. Our customers—and some of them are in the room today—are the experts in their products and their markets. However, what I would like to bring to the table today is the message that there's an information technology revolution happening, and it's happening in a context of sustainability, energy concerns, COP22, and a disruption to the power supply model of utilities and for industries with respect to integrating clean renewable energy.
We also have another revolution going on. It's called “Industry 4.0”. It's where the world of people and machines meets the Internet. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the fourth industrial revolution's IoT represents an $11.1-trillion business opportunity in the next eight years. That's more than 10% of global GDP.
The first point in my presentation is about people. Our workforce challenge at ABB—and that of our customers—is to face the pressures of finding the right people with the right technical skills and the ability to communicate effectively and to engage for productivity, with collaboration.
The future of this workforce is millennials. This generation is the most connected generation in history and will network right out of their workplace if their needs are not met. They are computer and digital native experts and they're connected by email, WhatsApp, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter—you name it.
This can be good news for the steel industry and other industrials who have already incorporated software and automation into processes and operations; however, the risk opportunity lies in thinking that this digital revolution is just a fad, or that some industries are less prone to being completely digitized or that it's less necessary. Today, things are so volatile and unpredictable that business cycles have been compressed to where you need to think about what your company looks like not just in two-, three-, or four-year cycles: you need to know where you're going to be in six months.
Digital isn't merely “digital”. It's really a new way of thinking and a new way of doing. I'm speaking to you from a $90-million campus that we're about to inaugurate officially. It's a completely open concept. If you could see it on either side of me, you would see that it's completely glass.
We're a completely open concept. I'm vice-president, and my boss doesn't have a desk, and I don't have a desk. We're all hotelling. This high-tech concept is a workplace 2020 notion, where collaboration and transparency are the order of the day, from the CEO right down to the IT specialist who's sitting with me.
Thank you to Robert Baronian, who is sitting with me.
We're in a perfectly flat, collaborative space because real time, same time is part of what makes a company efficient.