This is more of an economic thing, but a friend coincidentally forwarded me an article today about Motorola and the Chinese cellular phone industry. Every month, five million people sign up for cell phone service in China. That's a lot of phones.
Here's a passage I thought really interesting (the italics are mine) :
One of Motorola's most important suppliers is the battery maker BYD Company Ltd., based in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. In only a decade, the private company has gone from virtual invisibility to owning more than 50 percent of the global market in mobile-phone batteries. Before BYD, phone batteries were made in highly automated plants, like those run by Sanyo and Sony in Japan. But BYD, like Wanfeng, stripped robots and other machines out of the manufacturing process and replaced them with an army of workers. By paying for Chinese salaries, and not for million-dollar American, German or Japanese machines, BYD slashed the price of batteries. Initially the company could not meet Motorola's quality demands, but the American company sent a team of engineers to work with the upstarts, and six months later BYD earned a Six Sigma certification, a universally recognized badge of quality (which Motorola itself invented). The fact that in China machines can be replaced by people for huge cost savings and without sacrifice in quality changes the competitive landscape of the global marketplace. When Motorola and Nokia were pressed to lower their prices by Chinese competitors, they turned to BYD.
It also says that 1. Motorola's best technology was put to work in China, where cell phones are more efficient (cover more area, better service for less) than in the US, and 2. Motorola can now no longer to afford to pull out of the Chinese marketplace, because "the Chinese companies that emerged from the crucible of their market would be the leanest and most aggressive in the world, and a company like his would have no idea what hit it". That second thing sounds marvelously science fictiony, but I'm not positive it's as accurate as it could be. Maybe half true, and half drama. I'm no expert in the economics, but the language is definitely adversarial/propagandistic (earlier, the author refers to "an army of workers" replacing machines -- machine soldiers, see -- followed by the lean and hungry sharks coming out of the crucible -- metal sharks, man).
I'll try to source the article now... ah, apparently it's from the July 4 New York Times cover. You can find more excerpts over here. |
