Results tagged “China” from Birmingham Post - Business Blog

News yesterday that MGs were being produced at Longbridge seemed to catch everyone on the hop. Even the City Council, which has done so much to develop a positive relationship with owners Nanjing and Shanghai, seemed to be expecting the announcement next week.

A rather bungled PR operation by Shanghai should come as no surprise; afterall Chinese state-owned firms going international are very new to dealing with the media, as Duncan Tift notes on the front of Today's Post.

Maybe the experience they gain during the Olympics shortly will help with that. Better communication by Shanghai with the local media, and indeed their own workers, would help a lot here.

Leaving this aside, how much can we actually read into the news that a limited edition run of 500 'new' MG TFs has finally kicked off?

News in the Post today (read Duncan Tift's article here) that Shanghai Auto (SAIC) remains committed to the Longbridge site comes as welcome news given the uncertainty created in the wake of the recently announced StadCo pullout from MG TF production.

That MG TF production will finally restart in July this year also comes as some relief after lengthy delays given concerns over the quality of parts coming from China.

Let's get things in perspective, though. The TF is basically a 15-year old design with nearly all of the parts brought in from China. It is not a sustainable project beyond the very short term. And with StadCo leaving, we now basically see a screwdriver operation with very few linkages into the local economy and fewer benefits than we'd hoped for in terms of economic development.

That Shanghai are going ahead at all is the crucial thing, though. This keeps them interested in a site whether further production and R&D may come in time. It's here where the case needs to be made to SAIC. And there is a strong case to be made.

Before I begin, I apologise for my inexcusable absence, a combination of too many ideas, not enough time and IT incompetence on my part. However, hopefully I will have learnt from the experience...unlikely!

China, China, China. I have never been and would like to, it seems a lovely place, or at the very least interesting after the latest report on pollution in Beijing.

With the Olympics, they suddenly seem to have become the country to be talked about. Whether it is pollution, human rights, sports, foreign investment, China is the country we want to talk about.

Or do we? Well you answer that question for me...but here are a few of my musings on the subject.

Specifically, one: do we have the right to lecture the Chinese on pollution?

The last few months have been very gloomy across western economies. The US has been in meltdown and more remains to some based on most commentators.

Europe has continued to perform strongly but has suffered form a lack of structural change which has left cost structures in the Byzantine era. This is made worse by the newly found nationalist sentiment in France and Germany in particular.

So where is there any good news and what hope can we in the UK have for future economic growth?

Emerging Markets have long been touted as the key area for growth, with Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East being the preferred examples. This either because they have vastly growing middle classes such as in India and China or favourable locations for locating manufacturing facilities such has been the case in Eastern Europe.

The problem with all these assertions though is that they fail to understand the basic opportunities that emerging markets provide.