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China Overtakes US as Supplier of IT Goods
Ant writes "CNET News.com is reporting that 'after almost a decade of explosive growth in its electronics sector, China has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest supplier of Information Technology goods, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.' From the article: "The most spectacular demonstration of China's ambition to become a consumer electronics heavyweight came in May this year when Lenovo, the Chinese computer maker, paid $1.75 billion to buy IBM's personal computer unit."
... welcome our new chinese overlords. Better than the old ones...
if only their government didn't suck ass, they could be so great. they have immense cultural momentum, a well reasoned and disciplined populace, and a penchant for churning out intelligent people.
The day IBM sold it's PC business, this was only to be expected...
In other news, India overtakes the US as the leading Supplier of Software Services... not too long either.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
China has nowhere near as many IP lawyers protecting their "valuable intellectual property" as the USA.
Frankly, after the shootings the other day in China I wish we'd stop doing business with them. Our relationship with China is nothing to be proud of.
Wow... a Pentium II? I suppose that's pretty advanced, but I honestly thought they would be able to produce something better on their own.
From the article:
Also, China's efforts to impose its own technology standards across a range of consumer products, including mobile phones, digital photography and wireless networks, are widely interpreted as a strategy to dominate the global market for information technology goods.
That approach will probably serve them quite well within their own borders, but I don't see how they can hope to impose their own standards on the rest of the world. There are already standards (e.g. 3G) in place across the globe, accompanied by hardware produced by manufacturers in several countries. The Chinese standards would have to displace the incumbents (so to speak) and become widely adopted by those same former incumbents. It sounds like a very difficult - if not insurmountable - obstacle.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
JP Morgan and some other firms are now outsourcing finance positions to India for the first time. If the US doesn't wake up and go for FAIR trade, FREE trade will cut all of our collective throats.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
Because the companies can no more survive without employees than they can without customers, giving the employees a powerful bargaining position. This is the reason labour rights have progressed over the last century or so. As we (the workers) are not prepared to accept peanuts for our labour, the only way to keep industry in western nationa is to impose minimum labour standards on all companies we do business with
I wonder what selections the party has made for my viewing pleasure today?
~S
From a manufacturing base with huge exports of cars, military goods, computers, electronics and so on, to a services based economy.
Companies like GM, Ford, boeing are all being overtaken by European and Asian counterparts such as Airbus, Mercedes (who of course, recently took over Chrysler), Toyota and so on. Traditional industrial areas such as Arms manufacturing have been undercut by the European weapons giants FN and Heckler and koch, (the designers and makers of the next gen US army replacement rifle that will soon be replacing the M16.
IBM going to China, Chrysler going to Germany, Ford and GM opening plants in Mexico and Canada. America does not actually make that much stuff anymore (Germany remains the number one exporter in the world with China a close second).
But does that matter, is it no longer profitable for companies like IBM or GM to make product in America? Is the real money in IP, like with Microsoft, or with American Pharma giants like Pfizer? Or how does that explain companies like toyota opening up manufacturing plants in America? How does a service based economy provide the jobs necessary for 300 million people?
</irony>
Sadly, Lenovo now having IBM's computing line is making me look at ordering an old Thinkpad off Ebay rather than a brand-new shiny silver one (yes, they no longer come in just matte black, unfortunately)
It's not because a Chinese company is building this computer line, and we've all heard the cliches and stereotypes of Asian-quality products so I won't go further into that. It's the fact that IBM gave all the work on their Thinkpads and Thinkcenters to someone else, period. I know it was part of their big paradigm shift or whatever buzzword it is, but they made the choice for themselves. I'm all for China's economy and tech economy improving, but IBM selling out leads me to question the quality of their future products.
What we have at the moment couldn't remotely be called free trade.
Deleted
our new chinese overlords. Better than the old ones...
I'm not so sure.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I guess giving patents to everyone for everything, lengthening copyright to forever and a day, and criminalizing minor infringements didn't work. Which is funny given that the proponents of this IP regime argue that this is what the USA can make money selling.
Now if only the EU isn't so dumb as to fall for the same rubbish....
When I was growing up in the 80's, there was a big anti-communist thing going on (Most notibly, the great war epic Red Dawn). There was also a big "buy American" movement due to a strong Japanese economy. Now we have a communist economic powerhouse and noone seems to be raising a stink. Why is that? My only thought on this is that with China, US executives are still making money. The Japanese kept everything from manufacturing to management in-house. China just does the manufacturing and leaves the US management to their big salaries. I think you will only see the "Made in China" issue come to the forefront when they start managing everything, thereby screwing the US upper management.
I'm typing this on a 12" Apple PowerBook. Made in China. It's currently charging my 'Assembled in China' iPod. These would be tallied into the Chinese total, though they are clearly 'American' products and the bulk of their profits go to the (shareholders of the) American company.
While the advances in the Chinese IT industry are nothing less than phenomenal, I suspect that it will be at least a few decades before The States is knocked from the #1 position in IT.
In an oblique way, TFA says the same thing:
It is foreigners who have driven much of the growth, with heavy investment from global giants like Intel, Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft and Cisco Systems. Figures from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce show that companies that had received overseas investment accounted for almost 90 percent of 2004 exports of high technology products.
Oh yeah - and this OECD study only measures exports, not production. With Americans also leading the world in resource hoggery, American production may still lead Chinese production.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
They are doing something about it.
f m
http://www.voanews.com/english/2005-12-11-voa20.c
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
I'm surprised we were even #1!
I've NEVER seen ANY piece of computer equipment say "Made in the USA" in the past few years. In fact, I can't even recall any that said "Assembled in the USA". Ditto for Canada (our 51st state, eh?).
Everything you buy seems to be made somewhere in Asia. Usually China, sometimes (for slightly higher-quality stuff) Taiwan, or (for the GOOD stuff) Japan. Occasionally Korea, Malaysia, etc.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Don't forget that having a minimum wage can result in less jobs in some areas. It can also cause some jobs to disappear entirely, as the cost would be too high. The obvious solution is to allow illegal immigrants to work at illegal wages :-). On the other hand, higher wages (and less jobs) tend to motivate people to learn more (so they can compete, but also because the pay is better), and to replace dull jobs with robots whenever possible (robots are only as valuable as the equivalent human labor).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
"China is quickly becoming an innovator and, as we know, it has the money to turn those ideas into weapons," he said.
Why is it that commentators and news writers are always paranoid about China becoming a dangerous military superpower, yet apparently noone has a problem investing billions of dollars in the country as well as freely using their cheap labor to manufacture goods? Wal-Mart says about 60% of their goods are manufactured in China. Why all the paranoia if we are so willing and able to use them to make a profit?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Unions are specifically exempt from anti trust law by statute. So are the Major League Baseball Association and insurance companies.
I think the idea that they are attempting to impose standards is misplaced. I suspect that their main motivation is the desire to have standards that don't involve royalty payments -- at least, not external ones. It's a massive drain on profitability to be paying per-unit license fees on all these things.
Another thing to note about standards is that they are primarily a matter of ubiquity. You really don't have to care what encoding your digital mobile phone uses, or your video disc uses, etc., so long as its quality is "good enough" and you don't run into compatibility issues. Microsoft knows this, and uses their dominance of the desktop as leverage: if they want something to be a de facto standard, they just include it in the next Windows service pack. So long as enough goods are manufactured which support a particular protocol, that protocol becomes a de facto standard.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
We still lead the world in developing new technology. And China has some serious growing problems that they wont be able to alleviate for many years. There is a serious inequality in the number of women for men, there are going to be a lot of lonely men in China. The gobi desert is growing rapidly in the western border of the country and the Chinese government is throwing billions to try and stop the spread. The US and our allies still hold the material cards, as China despite its vastness has to import a lot of material just like Japan does to sustain its manufacturing based economy. China is a growing force to be reckoned with but they are not the juggernaut that the US has been since WWII
I've read a lot of posts about how the US is becoming a services-based economy. I have news for you, the services are being offshored as well. I went to my doctor for my annual physical last month, and while there was a nurse in the office performing the physical, the doctor was on an LCD screen from his office in, you guessed it, India.
Did you also know that there are law schools in India now that teach AMERICAN law and not Indian law? I'm guessing that paralegals and other support functions in Law will shortly be available for cheap offshoring.
I used to think that Medicine and Law would be the last things to go, but it seems I was wrong about that. As I scramble to find a safer profession than Engineering, I'm not even sure where to go. I thought of teaching, and then realized that there are movements afoot to move this overseas, too, with a cheap security guard in the classroom to maintain order and a cheap teacher overseas in front of a camera.
So, while it's not so untrue that America is becoming a services based economy, I think it would be more accurate to say that it is becoming an UNSKILLED or lesser-skilled services economy.
The Chinese have a lot of advantages. The first is sheer numbers...a higher number of people can be educated and work in the technology field. All other offshoring destinations (India, etc.) have this same advantage. The second is control; the Chinese government can still crack down and force people to do things that may otherwise be unpopular. The Soviet Union was famous for this when they forced the industrialization of Russia in a very short period of time. The third is an educational advantage. The only way to get ahead in Chinese society is education, and it seems from the numbers that parents drum this into their kids' heads right from the start.
I think that one of the things we could do to reverse the trend is to find a way to graduate more students in math/science/engineering. They're being scared off because they think that the only jobs left in this country will be in management. I can't say I blame them either.
Dont forget that our entire society is setup to mock intelligence, and tries to teach children that intelligence/education are somehow "bad" .. kids hear jokes about school as if to suggest not being there is the desired state of being, and smart people are always portrayed as nerds with thick glasses while football stars are portrayed as heros of virtue (rather than rapists and drug abusers... ahem ...).... I was involved with schoolboard in my local town and while we have a great program for disadvantaged students ("special education"), that special-ed program only covers kids who have a -dis-advantage rather than gifted students... Also consider that our town buys each kid on the football team $1500 in equipment NEW every year, but the kids on the chess club have to buy thier own chess sets and there is no funding for a computer team. I live in New Hampshire, in one of the more conservative towns, so its not a matter of the rich town giving football a budget, its a matter of where they put the priority.... Given how hard our society tries to actively discourage education and intelligence, can we be suprised in the slightest?
Application denied forever. Comeback in a thousand years and maybe we lets you back.
England? Read up on their empire and it is their politics that led to the whole mess in the middle east with how the formation of Israel was handled, they should have created a palistine at the same time or at least given Israel better borders (the whole golan heights issue is because it gives syria a very easy front to attack from and a very difficult for Israel to defend). Oh and who created the situation between India and Pakistan.
So the axis nations are out. Maybe france? Can you say vietnam? No thanks and that leaves out the US as well. China is out for obvious reasons. Russia? Oh boy no.
Maybe a small country like say my own the netherlands? Nope, indonesia and our other former colonies show that we are just hitlers on a miniature scale and anyway our behaviour during WW2 was appaling.
The belgians? Please they got a goverment so corrupt that it makes the italians look capable.
Australians? Maybe after they do somthing to right the wrong committed against the natives.
It doesn't exactly leave anyone? Sooner or later pretty much every country has done stuff in the last century that shows that if a country/society/ethnic group has a change they will murder rape and slaughter those they think of as less important.
The only reason some countries at the moment behave is because they would get their asses kicked if they didn't. Nazi sympathy in germany is still sky high but the russians would never tolerate them getting in a position of power to the power that be in germany sit on it at the moment but still refuse to deport war criminals or lock them up.
No kiddo, no country can take the moral highground. Wich isn't going to stop anyone of course because rule one of real life. It ain't bad if it is you doing it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yeah but have you ever seen a japanese-run minimart?
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Yes, but Japan has also had a very large influx of Japanese-speaking Koreans and Chinese over the past twenty years; there's a reason that Japan Town in San Fransisco has more signs in Korean than in Japanese.
The Japanese 'labor shortage' was never a problem; what fucked the Japanese, as the parent poster noted, was that they lost their currency edge, and then the inefficency of Japanese business practices caught up with them. The yuan is currently at an 8:1 ratio with U.S. dollars, much the same as the Yen was back during the early 70s, and the situation is indeed quite similar.
The difference on the U.S. side is that we still had an edge on the Japanese back during the 80s -- IT. Japan may have been making the cars and appliances more cheaply, but we were turning out engineers at a very brisk pace, and managed to build one hell of a computer software industry.
Unfortunately, we've by-and-large sold this out, crippled our educational system in a number of ways, and have made it almost impossible to start a company in the same way one would in the 1970s, because of all the new IP laws designed to protect big business.
Of course, time will tell one way or the other, but I'm happy that I'll be near-fluent in both German and Japanese by the time I get done with school, because I sure as hell don't want to limit my work options to the U.S. alone.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
As do american police; and your point was?
You are a complete asshat. The American police routinely shoot protesters? America has its problems, but to compare its treatment of citizens to China only demonstrates that you are an ignorant fool.
Absolutely right. It is the poor, poor, executives that make the sacrifices here in the US while the over fed, over indulgent, over rich workers make out like bandits.
Actually that is the way it was before unions caught on. You had super rich and super poor in the US. Unions equalized things for about 60 years. Now the wealth differences (as measured by ratios) are growing again. I hope you like the 1890-1920's because we are headed there again.
Table-ized A.I.