Marketing @ Knowledge Zone



The China Price

- by Syam Krishna *

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4. China sets the benchmark for labour market.

China can spend, hire and dictate wages; it can throw old-line competitors out of work. In just a three-year period from 2001 to late 2004, for example, China's exports to the U.S. of wooden bedroom furniture climbed from $360 million to nearly $1.2 billion.
During that time, the work force at America's wooden-furniture factories dropped by 35,000, or one of every three workers in the trade. China now makes 40% of all furniture sold in the U.S., and that number is sure to climb.

5. China's economy is an entrepreneurial economy.

China's industrial competitors, including the U.S., often misapprehend the source of China's productive strength. They fear that another centrally-governed, well-planned assault on strategic industries is being plotted in Beijing. The world has already seen how effective the Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese can be when they focus on sectors they mean to conquer. Even Chinese government planners like to talk as though they are aping the centrally-coordinated, government-financed assaults on strategic global industries that their Asian neighbors have pulled off over the past 40 years. For a world fretting over Chinese economic competition, the entities to fear are not government planners but enterprises that spring on the scene, lean and mean, planned and financed by investors who want to make money quickly.

6. China's growth is not only due to its ability to make cheap consumer goods, but its focus on latest technology.

The American economy won't crater just because the Chinese can produce sofas and socks for less than we can. The Japanese, for their part, have lost the television business. The Italians are losing the fine-silk business. Consumer goods trade on the surface of the world's economy and their movement is easy for the public to watch.

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* Contributed by -
Syam Krishna V. K. ,
B.Tech. (Prod. Engg.), Kerala University,
MBA 2007, DOMS, IIT Madras.