Let go with the chicken rice example.
Stall A sells chicken rice and priced at $3 per plate. The stall beside it, Stall B, also decided to sell chicken rice. The cost price for both stalls is $2 per plate.
Now if B sells above $2, is ok is fair competition. But if B sells below $2 then it makes no business sense for B!
Question is why and how B can price below $2? Well Stall B's boss can sell below cost because they can use profits from other stalls to subsidies Stall B. The is especially so if they have lots of resources. But why Stall B does that? Well, to chase stall A out of business!!!
But little does stall B knows that pricing is one factor, the taste and quality of the chicken rice are also deciding factors.
Excellent Chicken Rice analogy!
Let me extend it a little from another perspective.
Stall B took the convenient and shortcut way riding on the popularity of Stall A. They could have just logically improved on Port Klang, which is closer to their capital Kuala Lumpur, and capitalised on the more centralised location in Peninsular Malaysia. Instead they went farther south and stole Stall A's main customers Evergreen and Maersk - promising cheaper land and labour cost!
Unfortunately they couldn't match up to Stall A's efficiency. Port Klang took a long time searching for the containers they unloaded - because monkeys see monkeys do - they even sent their monkeys to visit PSA to look see look see to learn the trick of the trade.
But the cake was just too tempting - billions were lost through inefficiency or into the pockets of MCA, UMNO and MIC (The court case is not over yet). Their Transport Minister obviously looked the other side. At least PSA paid Yeo Ning Hong millions so that he could earn billions for Singapore.
So they baked another cake - Tg Pelepas. By awarding it to another crony from Kedah (all us of know which PM is from Kedah). Don't know why they called a decendant of Arab blood a Malay - a bumiputra!
MM Lee was right about Indonesia and Malaysia collusion.
Indonesia supplied Malaysia with sand from the sea north and south of Karimun to reclaim the swampy mangrove mouth of Sungei Pulai where Pelepas Port is located. But the Indon refused to sell a grain of sand to Singapore for its reclamation in Tuas - just across the Straits. The Indon claimed that Singapore destroyed their environment. KNN the Malaysians mined the same seabed and there was no environmental destruction!
What hypocrisy! They even caused the terrible haze in Southeast Asia and they said we KPKB just because of a little dust!
Bottom line :
Never trust the abang-adek relationship - even if they fight and throw shit at each other from time to time.
Singapore just have to work harder and smarter to win back its global customers. SM Goh's kind policies about "prosper thy neighbours" or "Growth Triangle" should just be thrown into the longkang.
Forget about getting any kind words or deeds in return from helping their sufferings from tsunamis or volcanic eruption or floods or earthquakes. Just do it so that we can increase our own karma.