Peter Marsh piece
As Industry Correspondent for the Financial Times, based in London, I had wanted to see for myself conditions for manufacturing companies in China, both those who are inward investors and also some local businesses. Before I embarked on my ambitious two-week tour around China, I had read huge numbers of articles about how manufacturing was booming in China. At the same time, I had seen how life for many manufacturing businesses based in the main high-wage countries (in the US, western Europe and Japan) was getting tougher, due to global competition and economic weaknesses. So how well were China-based companies really doing? Was it really as easy as the articles I read made out to operate manufacturing operations in China? What were the main challenges facing these businesses? These were among the questions I set about trying to answer.Fortunately, due to my role in covering global industry for the FT for the past eight years , I know fairly well top people at several hundred leading manufacturing businesses around the world. I set about contacting some of them by telephone and email to see if I could visit their operations in China. The main things I wanted from them were appointments with some of their top executives in this country, together with the opportunity to visit their plants. In each case I wanted to get them to be as frank as possible about conditions for their subsidiaries in China. I wanted them to give me as much information as they were prepared to release about such issues as the costs of manufacturing in China, their difficulties in recruitment and selling, and the main opportunities for growth , plus the impediments that could stop things happening. I was also keen to talk to as wide a variety of manufacturers as I could, from companies making cars to computers .That is how, helped by approximately 1,000 emails sent out from my office, I constructed from my desk in London a tour of China taking in some of the largest concentrations of manufacturing industry in the country. Included in the tour were visits and interviews with 25 companies with operations in different parts of China. Five of these companies are based in Japan; another five are Chinese-owned (including two whose head offices are in Hong Kong) ; four each are German and British; two each have head offices in the US and the Netherlands; the other three are based in Italy, Switzerland and France. The companies that I went to see cover a variety of areas of industry and size of operation. They include some of the biggest businesses in manufacturing globally, such as Siemens, the big German industrial group; Caterpillar of the US, the world’s biggest maker of construction machines; Fiat, the Italian auto company; ABB of Switzerland, one of the world’s largest electrical engineering concerns; Baosteel, China’s biggest maker of steel and one of the top 10 steelmakers worldwide; and Japanese electronics manufacturer Sharp, famous for a range of products from liquid crystal displays to microwave ovens. At the other end of the spectrum of companies on my list of those interviewed are quite small companies, including Domnick Hunter, a UK maker of industrial control equipment; Ace Mold, a Hong Kong based producer of tooling for industrial products; and Nichicon, a Japanese maker of specialist capacitors for the electrical industry. The tour took in Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Wuxi, Xiamen and the area around the Pearl River delta centred on Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Together with supplementary interviews conducted over the phone when I arrived back from China (mainly with other companies I had been unable to visit, plus consultants and business analysts) I made a total of roughly 80 interviews with people involved with manufacturing in China. The findings from these interviews are in the series of articles being carried on FT.com that you are to be invited to read. Fortunately for me, many people in China speak English (particularly those working for multinational companies ) which made communication for me a lot easier, since the only language I speak is English. But of course sometimes interpreters were necessary, particularly at Japanese companies where English speakers are often hard to find. China is a place where
