Le auto cinesi - gz
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By: GZ on Lunedì 05 Luglio 2004 15:49
Lo stratega di Morgan Stanley, Dart ragiona ora sempre in termini di:"... cosa fa la Federal Reserve... e cosa fa la Cina....", se la Cina compra altri bonds americani ad esempio oppure no, se la Cina espande il credito o lo frena ecc....
Qualunque strategia di investimento un pensa ora, che siano obbligazioni, cambi, indici di borsa o settori azionari va pensata in termini dell'Asia e della Cina in particolare.
Ad esempio il Nikkei è la borsa migliore del mondo sviluppato negli ultimi 12 mesi e l'economia giapponese per la prima volta in dieci anni ora cresce al ritmo di quasi il 5% nel 2004. Ma il merito è solo delle sue esportazioni verso la Cina, in Giappone non è cambiato molto, se ora c'è boom in giappone è solo perchè i cinesi comprano beni capitali che i giapponesi forniscono.
Altro esempio: il deficit estero USA dovrebbe in teoria portare a un problema perchè è ormai di 3mila miliardi di dollari e dovrebbe fare franare il dollaro. Ma se la Cina decide che le conviene riciclare i dollari che incassa investendoli in obbligazioni americane e tenere sul così il dollaro tutta questa teoria va a farsi friggere. E continuiamo ad avere tassi di interesse bassi e dollaro più o meno stabile alla faccia del deficit
La dimensione del fenomeno è difficile da comprendere se non si fa uno sforzo di immaginazione: ci sono in Cina 100 città con popolazione superiore a quella di Milano o Roma, cento città, non è che un miliardo di cinesi siano ancora in campagna e quelli che lavorano nell'economia industriale siano al massimo 100 milioni di persone.
E non si tratta di giocattoli e magliette, producono ora ad esempio delle auto di qualità identica a quelle giapponesi e americane, delle SUV Cherokee che costano solo dagli 8 ai 10 mila dollari in fabbriche robotizzate (vedi qua sotto un altro pezzo del report del NY Times di domenica citato prima)
(e poi uno pensa che la Fiat possa durare...)
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.....Mornings at Wanfeng automotive factory outside Shanghai begin with a neat line of employees doing calisthenics to martial music broadcast over a P.A. system. The blue-uniformed workers, nearly all of them young men, make for a clean-cut, well-pressed company line. The Japanese introduced courtyard exercises and company songs to the world back in the 70's, when that nation appeared to have the world's best industrial jobs. Today, Japan is just stumbling out of a long malaise, and its dwindling pool of young laborers seem to lack the compulsion to work like hell.
But the striving Japan of old still sets a good example for would-be worldbeaters, as Wanfeng's management knows -- only the Chinese manufacturer goes one better. Its employees regularly have their spirits revved at company boot camps run by People's Liberation Army drillmasters who inculcate the twin virtues of patriotism and hard work. The results are impressive. Ten years ago, Wanfeng was hammering out motorcycle wheels by hand in a Chinese garage; a few years later it was the No. l seller of aluminum-alloy motorcycle wheels, first in China and now in Asia. The company soon became a top national and global seller in alloy automobile wheels too.
Wanfeng may have received some breaks on the way up: the company-produced video that describes its rapid ascent does not identify the early contracts that enabled Wanfeng to grow so fast, nor whether Wanfeng had insider connections to state-run companies in the motorcycle and car businesses. There is nothing in the company literature about how the private company secured its financing, either. Nonetheless, Wanfeng today is still scrappy, aggressive and capable. It now turns out about 60,000 vehicles a year that, if you squint just a little, appear to be remarkably like Jeep Grand Cherokees. They look great, come with every modern luxury, including leather seats and DVD video systems, and purr when driven.
Yet Wanfeng's factory itself is a bare-bones machine. Most tellingly -- this goes a long way toward accounting for China's current status as an economic juggernaut -- there is not a single robot in sight. Instead, there are hundreds of young men, newly arrived from China's expanding technical schools, manning the assembly lines with little more than large electric drills, wrenches and rubber mallets. Engines and body panels that would, in a Western, Korean or Japanese factory, move from station to station on automatic conveyors are hauled by hand and hand truck here. This is why Wanfeng can sell its hand-made luxury versions of the Jeep (to buyers in the Middle East, mostly) for $8,000 to $10,000. The company isn't spending money on multimillion-dollar machines to build cars; it's using highly skilled workers who cost at most a few hundred dollars a month -- whose yearly pay, in other words, is less than the monthly pay of new hires in Detroit. Factory wages in the country's booming east coast cities can be $120 to $160 a month and half that inland, according to Merrill Weingrod of China Strategies, an affiliate of Kurt Salmon Associates, a consulting firm.