I am glad you have said what I have always known. The Chinese are very tolerant of the rest of the world, as they have always felt that China is the epicentre of everything. We are delusional to think otherwise. For the next 200 years the world that we thought belongs to us now belongs to China.
We do not get out mail delivered to the door now, we have to walk to a community mail box which is OK in the summer but a pain in the winter. The snow in front of the boxes does not get cleared too often and you cannot get at your mail with a winter coat on, the boxes are too small, you have to pull your sleeve up.
Neither do I buy yours. Your rosy limited view from the semiconductor industry perspective is, for a number of good reason I am sure you are aware of, distorted.
Regarding contract manufacturing, wait until your product is a global success, or if you want to penetrate the Chinese market, and you'll then get a taste of how things are running in China. Among those, what are the taxes if you are only manufacturing in China, or if you want to sell your products in China. This, and much more, well off any WTO regulations that western countries abide to.
I myself don't give a rat's *** if a company is driven by size or profit. I care about innovation, R&D and environment, where all Chines companies are among the worst in the world. They don't give a shite about innovation, because everything is there up for grab and for free, under the close supervision and encouragement of their ******* communist govt.
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Are the Chinese going to take over is the reason why the US government passed laws limiting Chinese immigration once the railroad across the USA was completed. As far as the question regarding are the Chinese going to take over- they already have in manufacturing. A few decades ago. Stockholders demand a return on their investments, manufacturing companies found that the most expedient way to increase profit was using cheaper labor. Why pay union wages to local labor when you can pay pennies on the US dollar for labor and not pay benefits? All this time, you have massively discontented labor force members waiting around for their job at the steel mill, mines and factories. If you have investments tied to the stock market, you are part of the reason. Whining about this is the same as whining about when the Roman's ruled Britain.
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About the same period for me but I have gone as a guest of locals, as a volunteer with Habitat, and as a vendor. The Habitat project was supposed to be for relief of earthquake victims but the government intervened (due to the, at the time, negative PR around the failure of construction there) and had us build shoddy apartments for the latest forced displacement in Chengdu instead.
The prevalence for fake stuff has not gone away some of it in food where it can reach life threatening in extreme cases.
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There's much more than cheap labor. Among others, your civilization need for clean water and air (try to breath in a hot summer day in Shanghai). Then try to protest about pollution in China and see for how long you'll survive with that.
Agreed that the ultimate responsibility is with the western corporation greed, coupled with the consumer appetite for Walmart products. There's also a huge amount of hypocrisy, steel mill workers complaining about their jobs being exported to the Far East, while enjoying $5 shirts sewed in a sweat shop, by a work force of 12-15 years children.
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But I agree with (and admire) the huge progress that China went through in the last decades. First time I stepped in a big Chinese town, in the early 80's, I was shocked by the early morning view of thousands of people of all ages and sexes, sitting at the curbs and exercising their biological needs. That was the only option at the time, since sanitary installations were practically unknown, and the urban density did not allow for any septic fossa.
Steel milling, coal mining and factories costs more in the USA because of all the environmental regulations and cost of complying with those regs. That's a good thing. Anybody remember how gritty Pittsburg used to be? Go there today and you'll see the improvement to the environment. We Westerners think we are entitled to low cost energy, cheap gasoline, cheap consumer goods. In the late 1980s, Walmart had banners and heavily advertised their Made in the USA line of consumer goods. Chinese clothing labor is being displaced by laborers in Vietnam, Cambodia and to an extent, the Philippines.
A Chinese man buying from RS etc ?
He will be buying in cheap fakes from China to sell at that price !
I have looked at buying in stuff from China but shipping charges VAT, import duties etc just kill it.
The Chinese have the advantage that their shipping is virtually free.
So the system is heavily biased towards the Chinese.
What is this supposed to mean? The Chinese cash buyers of luxury real estate are already starting to dry up. It might be a Chinese owner but it is also cash so all value is still here. During the Japanese bubble in 1988 billions were spent by Japanese citizens on real estate in the US and Australia much of it was sold back for as little as 10 cents on the dollar when the inevitable crash came. Pebble Beach country club comes to mind, 1 Billion paid and sold a few years later for 100 Million.
What goes around come around. I could mention a famous historian but he is a bit too un-PC.
I worked in the industry for 20 years (and electronics for 20 years before that) - ending up is a pretty senior position so I understand how the business works better than you do (I had to). Of course, your technical knowledge is much better than mine but that's besides the point.
Next time you use your iPhone/Android or any other high value electronic product, you can bet part of all of it was made by a CEM. Do you have another suggestion on how to model the value chain?
Don't bring prejudices to this discussion that don't belong here. The situation is what it is because that is what was agreed with China and the other WTO members when they joined the WTO in 2001. That most manufacturing jobs have gone there is not without the full encouragement and complicity of big Western corporations and the respective trade missions from their countries. Think about no capital controls, low trade barriers (i.a.o. low import duties), low labour costs, a huge (300 million+) well educated labour force and then the kind of profits to be made by off-shoring.
You are a PhD - read, question, understand and get a grip on these things - lashing out like this solves nothing and your premises are for the most part just plain wrong.
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When I was a Philips, one of the Business Lines spent $100 million developing a DVD chip set (a mobile phone chip set was about $200 million to dev in those days BTW). We had a Taiwanese competitor, Mediatek who also did the same thing.
They were smarter in their marketing than we were and developed a complete, fully productionized DVD player reference design and gave to all the CEM's.
Some of you may recall that in the early 2000's you could buy a DVD player at Walmart for about $25 and here in Europe for a similar price. Mediatek inside exactly the same PCB layout. Later they repeated the same technique with the feature phones and cleaned up the low and mid phone market in China.
(Philips pulled out of the DVD business after that - I can talk about these things now because that was 15 or 16 years ago)
I watched a YouTube video last night about the making of hand made paper mache object art by Kashmiri mountain tribal communities. It shocked me that their independent way of life and economic existence is now directly threatened by Chinese copyists appropriating their designs that have taken centuries to evolve, and severely undercutting them. So it is not just western hi-tech or consumerist industries that are being undermined. This type of globalised cultural asset stripping is an anathema to diversity and innovation.
I cannot see it ending well, and wish I could be a bit more positive about what I am describing.
I cannot see it ending well, and wish I could be a bit more positive about what I am describing.
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