–
With a timing that can only be described as exquisite, the Economist today publishes their in-depth survey of business in China. It appears at a time when the media is brimming with stories, often in my view overblown, about China’s economic problems and challenges. The Economist survey provides light where there’s been way too much heat of late. I couldn’t recommend more highly taking the time to read it in full.
Please click here to go direct to the survey on the Economist website. It includes nine separate articles, each offering a banquet of analysis, ideas and insights on where China’s economy, both private sector and SOE, is heading.
The author of the survey is Vijay Vaitheeswaran, the China business and finance editor. This is the first Economist China business survey in many years. It was certainly no small undertaking. China’s size, complexity and ever-morphing business environment make a comprehensive future-looking summary of this kind difficult in the extreme to do well.
I got to meet Vijay during his research phase. I took him for Tibetan food in Shenzhen. He ended up quoting me briefly in one of the articles in the survey.
Vijay paid particular attention to accelerating innovation cycles in China’s hardware industry. He spent a few days in Shenzhen including attending a kind of hacker forum for hardware geeks. He calls Shenzhen “the world’s best place to start a hardware firm” and visited my favorite exemplar of this, 18-month-old mobile phone brand OnePlus.
Quick aside, since the launch of its new model, the OnePlus 2 six weeks ago, the waiting list to buy one has grown to over five million people. If OnePlus’s factories can keep pace with the exploding demand, the company is on track to sell over $2 billion of phones in coming twelve months.
While overall highly positive about China’s economic prospects and the ambitions of its vast pool of private sector entrepreneurs, the survey sounds a note of caution. It argues that the less efficient state-owned sector appears more and more like an unevolved creature from a foregone era. They are, the survey warns, sucking up too much of China’s capital and achieving too little with it, all the while fighting to maintain the cozy monopolies that keep the far more dynamic and efficient private sector shut out.
How much market? How much government control and ownership? All countries struggle to find a balance. China stands out because the private sector has come so far so fast. Thirty years ago when I first set foot in China there was no private sector to speak of. Now, in all but the so-called “commanding heights” of China’s economy, entrepreneurs run rampant. 1.4 billion Chinese benefit from this fact every day.
–
–