Welcome back to the 1960s. Every industrialist in Hong Kong would have nodded in complete agreement with Mr Kopper's idea back then. They all had their own brand names in those days.

But how many of those names do you still see today except in small Asian niche markets such as patent medicine and instant noodles? The industrialists all eventually found it was more profitable and less risky to manufacture goods under some bigger foreign corporation's brand name if they wanted a wider market.

It costs billions these days to create an internationally recognised brand name and if people who try to do it aren't careful they may find that the goods they are marketing under that name have to be marked up so much in price to pay for the advertising campaign that the buying public still stays away and the brand name is a failure.

Hong Kong is not Germany. It is not going to create a brand name success on its own. That route was tried and the industrial economy has evolved away from it and found itself channelled into things it does better, such as the design, marketing and shipping of light consumer-durables rubbish for anyone who wishes to stick their own corporate name on it.

Mr Kopper also seems to think that the college training and on-the-job apprenticeships which lie behind the success of Germany's motor industry are a lesson to Hong Kong. Here again, he doesn't seem to know quite what town he has landed in.

Hong Kong does not have the luxury of a European Union to protect its manufacturers from competition and to create a domestic market for them, which is one reason that it no longer has much manufacturing industry.

The loss does not seem to have hurt us greatly, although it might if we were to spend great gobs of money setting up apprenticeship programmes for jobs which no longer exist, as Mr Kopper seems to think we should.

Come to think of it if Fortress Europe were not there to protect the German motor industry from competitive pressure to relocate to lower cost locations the investment in apprenticeship programmes might be equally misplaced in Stuttgart.

It is hardly fair for Mr Kopper to preach to Hong Kong people that they should spend more on education as if they don't spend a great deal on it already. Take the amount spent on education, including through taxes, as a percentage of total household expenditure and it is a safe bet that the figure is higher here than it is in Germany.

The difference may be that very little of it is spent here on teaching people how to twist wrenches in case that is what he meant by education.

The same goes for research and marketing. Research may not consist here of studying in depth what properties of what steel alloys will permit a car frame to retain its shape against a pressure of how many tonne kilometres. It is more centred on what the kiddies will want at Christmas this year.

This may seem more frivolous too but go tell that to your children and see what their judgment of the matter is. It works for what Hong Kong needs and it works very well. The results can be seen in the profit-and-loss accounts of the toy and doll makers.

Mr Kopper finally urges us to make better use of our location to help the mainland prosper. We might as well urge residents of Frankfurt to make better use of their location to help Germany prosper. If that puzzles them we can refer them to Mr Kopper.

He seems to have some reasoning in there somewhere that would make sense of it.

It would be best if he offered it to them immediately. There is clearly not much he can do for us.