I had a long chat with David Harris yesterday, David has been intrumental in providing help for Lister owners worldwide after he retired from Listers.
Most of what was R A Lister is gone, there is housing and a new hospital on the old site, and what remains is a very small assembly operation.
At their peak, Lister employed nearly 4000 people, and if you add Petter and the other ABOEM companies like J H McLaren, Oil Engines (Coventry) etc etc then you're probably looking at 10,000 jobs.
Where did it all go?
The market that Lister sold into was a captive one made up of the UK and Commonwealth countries, plus a fair bit of the rest of the worlds.
Cost competitiveness was the first problem, UK wages couldn't compete with far eastern, and as the Japanese and Malaysians have found out, they in turn cannot compete with the Koreans and Chinese.
So we can now buy a small petrol engines generator on ebay for £120 or $200, it's a load of cr*p and the construction quality is poor, but they sell well and keep someone in work in those countries.
We don't make much any more in the UK, apart from the car industry which isn't doing too badly, but our manufacturing base is very low and only accounts for about 7% of GDP.
When the Chinese and Korean workers get to the 2-car household level, they will probably struggle to find a cheap source for their purchases, as their own products will be too expensive.
Peter
