Archive for ‘Chindia Alert’

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08/01/2013

* India Proposes Curbs on Tech Imports

WSJ: “India has proposed sweeping curbs on the import of technology products ranging from laptops to Wi-Fi devices to computer-network equipment.

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The proposed regulations, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, would create an expansive “Buy India” mandate requiring a large percentage of the high-tech goods sold in the country to be manufactured locally.

If implemented, the rules could wreak havoc on the business plans of a wide range of U.S. and other foreign firms, including hardware-makers Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO -0.40% and Dell DELL -2.22% Inc.; services companies such as International Business Machines IBM -0.64% Corp.; and telecom-gear suppliers such as Nokia Siemens Networks B.V. and Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson ERIC-B.SK -3.89% .

To comply with the rules, foreign companies would have to set up factories in India quickly—possibly as soon as April—or significantly expand their existing manufacturing capacity in a country where the infrastructure is poor and building plants can take years because of red tape and other hassles.

Or they could face the loss of current business—collectively the industries affected generate billions of dollars in sales here annually—and the chance to tap into what is expected to be a booming technology market in years to come. Spending in India’s technology and electronics market is expected to reach about $400 billion by 2020, up from $45 billion in 2009.

Proposed regulations would require most high-tech goods sold in India to be made there. A Dell factory in India.

The rules are in draft form, and their sweep may reflect some brinkmanship on the part of the Indian government, which wants foreign firms to increase manufacturing in India. The government could still choose to delay or scale back its plan.

Still, U.S. lobbyists and industry are strenuously opposing the proposals, which have quickly become the most serious point of tension in commercial relations between the two countries. The proposals also aren’t the U.S. government’s only concern. It is also trying to head off Indian anti-tax-avoidance rules that would expose foreign investors to huge potential liability if they take effect in April as planned.

“India is the largest free-market democracy in the world. To mandate local manufacturing is antithetical to the very concept of a free marketplace,” said Ron Somers, president of the U.S.-India Business Council, a lobby group for U.S. firms in India.”

via India Proposes Curbs on Tech Imports – WSJ.com.

Posted in Digital communications, Economics, Import, India alert, Manufacturing, Technology | Leave a Comment »

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08/01/2013

* Mahindra to Launch Sun-Powered Car

WSJ: “Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. plans to launch a new, sun-powered electric vehicle in India in the hope that high fuel prices will push consumers to look for new options in the car market.

The car, called e2o,  runs on lithium ion batteries that allow it to travel 100 kilometers in one charge, the company said in a statement Tuesday. The vehicle, the only four-seater electric car in India, can also be solar charged, the statement said. The company will produce it at its new plant in Bangalore and plans to launch it in the market by March.

The name of the vehicle – pronounced “ee to oh” – follows the Mahindra tradition of having vehicle names ending with o (Scorpio, Bolero, Xylo, Gio, Genio). The company said the “e” in the name stands for the energy of the sun, and the “0” for oxygen.”

via Mahindra to Launch Sun-Powered Car – India Real Time – WSJ.

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Posted in Economics, Environment, India alert, Manufacturing | 1 Comment »

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07/01/2013

* All cold on the southern front

I didn’t realise until this article that northern Chinese cities has district heating supplied by the municipal authorities. I don’t know if that is free or paid for. But regardless, it must be much cheaper than providing your own heating.

Xinhua: “In ravaging cold, when Chinese people living in northern cities are enjoying indoor warmth, southerners wonder how long they have to wait for before the government decides to install a public heating network.

The problem is they are trapped by a line drawn by late Premier Zhou Enlai six decades ago.

The line, which stands between 32 and 34 degrees north latitude, almost along the Huaihe River and Qinling Mountains, not only defines China’s northern and southern parts, but also determines different winters for the people.

Cities to the north of the line have public heating which circulates hot water generated by government heating stations through pipelines and radiators inside almost every resident’s building and public facility.

Room temperatures in the north could be more than 20 degrees Celsius.

However, people living in cities to the south of the line, including the country’s largest city Shanghai and other major metropolitans Chongqing, Nanjing, Wuhan, have to use various private and isolated heating devices to warm their freezing and humid houses.

The southerners have been plagued by the winter chill and have been complaining, especially after cold-air outbreaks when snow and ice have frozen southern provinces such as Hunan and Guangdong.

“Without heating indoors, even getting up takes a lot of courage,” “wangzikai” said on the popular twitter-like Sina Weibo.

Dai Tongtong, a freshman studying in central China’s Wuhan City, is a northerner. She said the cold mixed with moisture in the south affects her no matter how thick her clothes are.

To get away from cold of the dormitories, she and her fellow students cram into libraries and public reading rooms to share warmth generated by air conditioners.

In an opinion poll conducted by http://www.qq.com on Thursday, 88 percent of a total of 104,618 participants voted to install a collective public heating network in the south.

Some local governments in the south have started to build trial heating networks in urban communities, while national legislators and political advisors still endeavor to persuade the central government in giving local governments the option to construct public heating networks covering whole cities.”

via Web China: All cold on the southern front – Xinhua | English.news.cn.

Posted in China alert, district heating, Economics | Leave a Comment »

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07/01/2013

* China turns dark page of history, puts end to labour camps

Reform, reform and more reform.

SCMP: “In a clear reversal of a decades-old practice of human rights abuse, China announced on Monday that it would put a stop to the system of “re-education through labour”, more commonly known as labour camps, in 2013.

lab_camp2.jpg

A senior Chinese legal official told the Post that Meng Jianzhu, head of the Communist Party’s Poltiical and Legal Affairs Committee, told a meeting of judicial and legal officials from all over the country on Monday that the Party had decided it would stop the practice of sending people to labour camps within the year.

“The Central Committee has decided, after research, that after approval by the National People’s Congress, to stop using the system of re-educastion through labour this year,” said the official who attended the meeting.

“I feel that Secretary Meng’s comments were filled with a new spirit, that they signal the progress our society has made. ””

via China turns dark page of history, puts end to labour camps | South China Morning Post.

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Posted in China alert, Good news, Politics, Reform | 1 Comment »

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07/01/2013

* Use of student interns highlights China labor shortage

Reuters: “In September, the largest factory in the northeastern Chinese coastal city of Yantai called on the local government with a problem – a shortage of 19,000 workers as the deadline on a big order approached.

Chinese college students majoring in textile work at a garment factory in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, October 19, 2012. More and more factories in China move inland from higher-cost coastal manufacturing centers, labor is turning out to be neither as cheap nor abundant as many companies believed. As a result, many multinationals and their suppliers are corralling millions of teenage vocational students to work long hours doing assembly line jobs that might otherwise go unfilled - jobs that the students have no choice but to accept. Picture taken October 19, 2012. REUTERS/Stringer

Yantai officials came to the rescue, ordering vocational high schools to send students to the plant run by Foxconn Technology Group, a Taiwanese maker of smartphones, computers and gaming equipment.

As firms like Foxconn shift factories away from higher-cost centers in the Pearl River Delta in southern Guangdong province, they are discovering that workers in new locations across China are not as abundant as they had expected.

That has prompted multinationals and their suppliers to use millions of teenage students from vocational and technical schools on assembly lines. The schools teach a variety of trades and include mandatory work experience, which in practice means students must accept work assignments to graduate.

In any given year, at least 8 million vocational students man China’s assembly lines and workshops, according to Ministry of Education estimates – or one in eight Chinese aged 16 to 18. In 2010, the ministry ordered vocational schools to fill any shortages in the workforce. The minimum legal working age is 16.

Foxconn, the trading name of Hon Hai Precision Industry, employs 1.2 million workers across China. Nearly 3 percent are student interns.

The company “has a huge appetite for workers”, Wang Weihui, vice director of the Yantai Fushan Polytechnic School, told Reuters during a recent visit to the city.

“It tightens the labor market,” said Wang, whose school sends its students to work at Foxconn and other firms.

Local governments eager to please new investors lean on schools to meet any worker shortfall. That’s what Yantai, in Shandong province, did in September when Foxconn had trouble filling Christmas orders for Nintendo Co Ltd Wii game consoles.

“It has been easier to recruit workers in the Pearl River Delta than some inland locations,” Foxconn told Reuters in written comments in late December.

Some companies cite rising wages in southern China for the shift elsewhere. Wages are a growing component of manufacturing costs in China, making up to 30 percent of the total depending on the industry, according to the Boston Consulting Group.

Wages began to rise around 2006 as the migration of rural workers to Guangdong ebbed. China’s one-child policy, plus a jump in higher education enrollment, further depleted the number of new entrants to the workforce, forcing up wages.”

via Use of student interns highlights China labor shortage | Reuters.

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Posted in China alert, Economics, employment, Labour, labour shortage, Manufacturing, temporary workers | 1 Comment »

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07/01/2013

* China newspaper journalists stage rare strike

I wonder how long and how far central government will tolerate this dissent.

BBC: “Journalists at a major Chinese paper, Southern Weekly, have gone on strike in a rare protest against censorship.

Demonstrators gather along a street near the headquarters of Southern Weekly newspaper in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, 7 January 2013.

The row was sparked last week when the paper’s New Year message calling for reform was changed by propaganda officials.

Staff wrote two letters calling for the provincial propaganda chief to step down. Another row then erupted over control of the paper’s microblog.

Supporters of the paper have gathered outside its office, reports say.

Some of the protesters carried banners that read: “We want press freedom, constitutionalism and democracy”.

Police did not interfere with the protesters outside the paper’s offices, according to reports.

“The Nanfang [Southern] Media Group is relatively willing to speak the truth in China so we need to stand up for its courage and support it now,” Ao Jiayang, one of the protesters, told Reuters news agency.

If the Southern Weekly strike continues for any length of time, this scandal will create a major headache for China’s new leader, Xi Jinping. Since he took the reins of power in Beijing, Mr Xi has generated kudos for his seemingly laid-back, open style of leadership. But the Southern Weekly uproar will force him to reveal his hand when it comes to censorship.

Will he support Tuo Zhen, the zealous propaganda chief who ignited the fracas at Southern Weekly by censoring its editorial message? The highly-popular newspaper has experienced run-ins with government censors in the past, but its stellar reputation has also allowed it to publish hard-hitting reports on a wide range of sensitive topics, from working conditions at Foxconn factories to the spread of HIV in China’s rural areas.

Other major Chinese media outlets have been forced to toe the government line in recent years, leaving Southern Weekly unrivalled in its pursuit of top-level investigative journalism. If Mr Xi allows Southern Weekly’s special status to be wiped away, he risks tarnishing his carefully cultivated reputation as a humble man of the people.

Southern Weekly is perhaps the country’s most respected newspaper, known for its hard-hitting investigations and for testing the limits of freedom of speech, says the BBC’s Martin Patience in Beijing.

Chinese media are supervised by so-called propaganda departments that often change content to align it with party thinking.”

via BBC News – China newspaper journalists stage rare strike.

Posted in Censorship, China alert, Politics, public protest | Leave a Comment »

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06/01/2013

* Flextronics CEO Sees Hope for U.S. Tech Production

Yet another article on manufacturing moving back to Western countries. This is particularly where the cost of labour is a small fraction of the total cost of production – eg in high-tech products. 

WSJ: “The CEO of Flextronics International Ltd.,  a Singapore-based company that helped hundreds of firms move manufacturing of electronic parts and products to Asia, says it is getting “easier to justify” production in the U.S.

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The difference in labor costs is narrowing and local officials in America have been giving more financial incentives to companies setting up plants in the U.S., Mike McNamara, chief executive of Flextronics, said in an interview Friday. Mr. McNamara said he could even imagine some smartphones being made in the U.S. eventually. But he cautioned that the return of manufacturing to the U.S. is likely to be a “slow and evolving process” rather than a flood. Many obstacles remain, including relatively high U.S. taxes, health-care expenses and regulatory costs, he said.

“In Asia, if I want to get something done, we just go and get it done,” he said. An Asian plant with 5,000 employees could be set up in 90 days, he said, but it takes much longer in the U.S., partly for regulatory reasons. Flextronics has plants in 30 countries, including the U.S.

Apple Inc.  raised hopes for a revival of U.S. manufacturing a month ago by announcing plans to build some Mac computers in the U.S. for the first time in about a decade. Flextronics says Apple is one of its customers, but Mr. McNamara declined to comment on whether his company could be involved in the Mac initiative. Apple declined to comment on exactly where and how those computers will be made.

In the first decade of this century, Mr. McNamara said, manufacturers flocked to low-wage countries. Over the next decade, he said, more are likely to adopt regional manufacturing strategies, making goods closer to where they are sold. That can reduce transport and inventory costs; it also allows companies to respond faster to changes in demand and more effectively protect technological secrets.

Asian plants typically have more flexibility to set up new production lines quickly, which is important for products with short life cycles like smartphones. Still, as products become more customized and companies try harder to keep rivals from copying technology, Mr. McNamara said, some phone makers who want to make products to order for local customers eventually may produce certain types of smartphones in the U.S.

Flextronics, founded in 1969 in Silicon Valley and incorporated in Singapore in 1990, provides design, logistics and manufacturing services for several hundred companies. Mr. McNamara said Flextronics is the world’s second-largest company in that business, after Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.,  known as Foxconn and based in Taiwan.”

via Flextronics CEO Sees Hope for U.S. Tech Production – WSJ.com.

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Posted in Chindia Alert, Economics, innovation, Labour, Manufacturing, Outsourcing, Reverse off-shoring, Technology | 2 Comments »

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06/01/2013

* Raspberry Pi production moves to Wales from China

Yet another example of manufacturing of high-tech (hence low proportion of labour cost) back to the West.

BBC: “Production of the popular Raspberry Pi computer is switching from China to south Wales.

Raspberry Pi with SD memory card attached

The £16 credit card-sized computer, which aims to get young people interested in programming, was launched earlier this year to critical acclaim.

The success of the venture has now seen Sony step in to offer its Pencoed plant near Bridgend to make the mini-computer.

The deal will see 300,000 boards built, creating an extra 30 jobs at the site.

Sony will make the new computers for the company Premier Farnell, which distributes the Raspberry Pi on behalf of the device inventors, the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

It’s been coming off the lines at Pencoed for a few weeks, so people now actually have them in their hands”

Eben Upton, the charity’s executive director said: “It’s a fantastic day for us. This has been in the pipeline for about six months after we visited the Sony site.

“It is so good to see that we can still do this sort of thing in the UK – do it in Wales.”

via BBC News – Raspberry Pi production moves to Wales from China.

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Posted in China alert, Economics, Manufacturing, Reverse off-shoring | 1 Comment »

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06/01/2013

* China building nuclear power plant with fourth-generation features

Xinhua: “China has broken ground on a 3 billion-yuan (476 million-U.S. dollar) nuclear power project that will be the first in the world to put a reactor with fourth-generation features into commercial use, a Chinese energy company said Sunday.

It also marks China’s latest move to speed up nuclear power development, which came to a halt after the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan in 2011.

Construction of the project at Shidao Bay in the coastal city of Rongcheng, east China’s Shandong Province, began last month, Xinhua learned from Huaneng Shandong Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Co., Ltd. (HSNPC), the builder and operator of the plant.

With a designed capacity of 200 megawatts and “the characteristics of fourth-generation nuclear energy systems,” the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor will start generating power by the end of 2017, the HSNPC said in a statement sent to Xinhua via email.

Independently developed by China’s Tsinghua University, the reactor has the features of “inherent safety” and “passive nuclear safety” in line with the fourth-generation concept, meaning it can shut down safely in the event of an emergency without causing a reactor core meltdown or massive leakage of radioactive material, according to the statement.

The reactor can have an outlet temperature of 750 degrees Celsius, compared with 1,000 degrees Celsius that can be reached by the very-high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, an internationally-accepted fourth-generation reactor concept.

It can also raise electricity generation efficiency to around 40 percent from the current 30-percent level of second- and third-generation reactors, said the statement.

If it is commercially successful, the reactor’s technology and equipment can be exported to other countries in the future, said an HSNPC public relations officer who declined to be named.

“That will be a great boost to China’s nuclear industry, as a very high percentage of the equipment is produced domestically instead of being imported,” the official told Xinhua by telephone.

The project is part of the HSNPC’s broader plan to build a 6.6-gigawatt (GW) nuclear power plant that will require approximately 100 billion yuan in investment over 20 years. If completed, it would be China’s largest nuclear power plant, said the official.

The rest of the plan includes four 1.25-GW AP1000 pressurized water reactors and a 1.4-GW CAP1400 pressurized water reactor.

via China building nuclear power plant with fourth-generation features – Xinhua | English.news.cn.

Posted in China alert, Construction, Economics, Electricity, Environment, Infrastructure, innovation, Science, Technology | 2 Comments »

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06/01/2013

* Pirated Copy of Design by Star Architect Hadid Being Built in China

Spiegel Online: “Star architect Zaha Hadid is currently building several projects across China. One of them, however, is being constructed twice. Pirates are the process of copying one of her provocative designs, and the race is on to see who can finish first.

Star architect Zaha Hadid has become one of the most admired architects in the...

London-based Zaha Hadid, widely regarded as one of the leading lights in the constellation of avant-garde architecture, has likewise become a superstar in China, where her latest designs radiate out through architecture schools and studios across the country. On a recent trip to Beijing, 15,000 artists, architects and other fans swarmed to a talk she gave for the opening of the futuristic Galaxy SOHO complex — just one of 11 projects she is designing across the country.

But the appeal of the Prtizker Prize winner’s experimental architecture, especially since the unveiling of her glowing, crystalline Guangzhou Opera House two years ago, has expanded so explosively that a contingent of pirate architects and construction teams in southern China is now building a carbon copy of one of Hadid’s Beijing projects.

What’s worse, Hadid said in an interview, she is now being forced to race these pirates to complete her original project first.

The project being pirated is the Wangjing SOHO, a complex of three towers that resemble curved sails, sculpted in stone and etched with wave-like aluminum bands, that appear to swim across the surface of the Earth when viewed from the air.

Zhang Xin, the billionaire property developer who heads SOHO China and commissioned Hadid to design the complex, lashed out against the pirates during the Galaxy opening: “Even as we build one of Zaha’s projects, it is being replicated in Chongqing,” a megacity near the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. At this point in time, she added, the pirates of Chongqing are building faster than SOHO. The original is set for completion in 2014.

‘China Can Copy Anything’

Zhang has issued an open appeal for help in combatting this massive, open counterfeiting operation, and lamented: “Everyone says that China is a great copycat country, and that it can copy anything.”

Piracy is pervasive in China, where counterfeit iPods, iPhones and iPads are sold openly, and even entire fake Apple stores have proliferated across upwardly mobile cities. Although China has, on paper at least, a series of laws to protect intellectual property, enforcement of these rules is wildly sporadic.

Yet You Yunting, a Shanghai-based lawyer who founded an online journal covering intellectual property issues, said China’s copyright law includes protection for works of architecture. You said he has studied the copying of the Hadid project, and added: “The two versions of the complex are quite similar.”

“SOHO could have a good chance of winning litigation in this case,” he predicted. “But even if the judge rules in favor of SOHO, the court will not force the defendant to pull the building down. But it could order the payment of compensation.””

via Pirated Copy of Design by Star Architect Hadid Being Built in China – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Posted in China alert, Construction, Economics, Intellectual Property Rights | 3 Comments »

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