Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Sept 7, 2015 (IV)

choi

(7) Bruce Einhorn with Annie Lee, China Prods Industry to Make a Great Lap.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/ar ... o-make-a-great-leap

Quote:

“In May, the State Council endorsed a 10-year manufacturing plan aimed at fostering innovation, promoting the creation of more local brands, and encouraging greener production. Headlined Made in China 2025 中国制造2025, the blueprint identifies 10 strategic industries, including robotics, IT, aerospace, and new-energy vehicles.

“The blueprint ‘is born out of necessity,’ says Karel Eloot, a senior partner at McKinsey in Shanghai. To remain competitive in manufacturing, ‘China needs to find a new wave of productivity improvements,’ he says. Low-wage, low-skilled labor fueled the first phase of China’s industrial revolution, but workers are no longer as plentiful or cheap. Because of the success of the one-child policy, population growth has slowed dramatically and the workforce is shrinking. And so the industries named in Made in China 2025 are less labor-intensive than those that powered almost two decades of double-digit export growth.  While the plan is short on specifics, policymakers will likely rely on a combination of regulations and incentives to achieve their goals.

My comment:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: A new plan favors enterprises that are green and less labor-intensive
(b) There is no need to read the rest, which are insignificant.

choi

(8) Matthew Phillips, The US Dollar Is Stronger Than Steel.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/ar ... stronger-than-steel

the first two paragraphs:

“When John Pierpont Morgan bought Andrew Carnegie’s steel business and combined it with two competitors to create US Steel in 1901, the result was the world’s first billion-dollar corporation. Its roughly $1.4 billion market value would translate into about $33 billion in current dollars. But the company is worth less than a tenth of that today, at just under $2.5 billion.

“While the steel industry has been fading in the US for decades, things have gotten worse recently. A strong US dollar, combined with a slowing Chinese economy, is bringing unprecedented amounts of cheap, foreign steel to the US, swamping domestic producers. Average monthly imports spiked by almost 1 million metric tons in 2014, a 38 percent increase from 2013. Through June of this year, steel imports averaged 3.3 million metric tons a month, roughly the same as last year. A lot of that is coming from China, the world’s largest producer. Although its economy has cooled, leading to the first dip in steel demand there in a generation, China’s mills have kept chugging along. Much of the excess output is being shipped overseas. In the first half of this year, China’s steel exports rose 28 percent compared with the same period in 2014.

My comment:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: The US industry is battling a tide of cheap imports
(b) Quotation 1 shines light on China’s stupidity to promote domestic production of (low-grade) steel since 1949. Its effort is a century late.
(c) JP Morgan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Morgan
(section 2.5 Steel)
(d) There is no need to read the rest.