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Bloomberg BusinessWeek, June 1, 2015

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楼主
发表于 5-31-2015 17:52:51 | 只看该作者 回帖奖励 |正序浏览 |阅读模式
Bloomberg BusinessWeek, June 1, 2015
Brian Bremner with Isabel Reynolds, Ting Shi and Rose Kim, Japan Unleashes a Robot Revolution.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... -a-robot-revolution

Quote:

“In factory robots, Japanese companies including Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric, and Kawasaki Heavy Industries command 50 percent of the global market, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). The nation’s companies also enjoy a 90 percent share in parts such as precision gears, servo motors to move robotic limbs, and specialized sensors.

“Japan's robotics sales are "600 billion yen ($4.9 billion) annually * * * South Korea has doubled the size of its robot sales since 2009 to 2.4 trillion won ($2.2 billion) in 2013. The country is working on service robots for health care and other markets. Unlike factory robots, 'where Japan, Germany, and the US are dominant players, the intelligent service robot industry is still at a nascent state,' says Jeong Man Tae, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade.

“With Japan’s declining workforce, job displacement won’t be as much of a barrier to rolling out more machines [factory or service robots] as it would in the US. * * * Japan’s inefficient service sector—it’s only about 60 percent as productive as its U.S. counterpart, says METI—could benefit.

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: Its domination of the industry is challenged by Korea and China

(b) “at the entrance of the Mitsukoshi 三越 department store in central Tokyo * * * is a robot made by Toshiba [that] shows how lifelike these machines can be.”
(i) 1673年 - 三井高利 MITSUI Takatoshi が江戸 (now Tokyo) に、呉服店「越後屋  Echigoya」を開業 [this is the beginning of Mitsui Group]. In 1893 三 from the surname and 越 from the store name formed the portmanteau 三越.  ja.wikipedia.org
(ii) 呉服 = cloth, textile
(iii) Robot Department Store Receptionist Starts Work in Tokyo. YouTube.com, published by NTDTV on Apr 20, 2015 (length: 2:31)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=s95ZGQKl96k

(c) “Wang Tianran, a robotics specialist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.”

中国科学院沈阳自动化研究所 王天然


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板凳
 楼主| 发表于 5-31-2015 17:54:16 | 只看该作者
(4) James Tarmy, The Shoelace Crisis. As diets change and drought drags on, cattle--and their hides--are getting more expensive. That’s got Auburn Leather in a bind. (one of the four feature stories).
www.bloomberg.com/news/features/ ... ng-american-leather

Quote:

(a) “There used to be more leather lacemakers in America, until the exodus of manufacturing to China in the 1990s. Howlett alone survived the purge [so, the 152-year-old Auburn Leather makes leather shoelaces in Kentucky, ships them via air to China where leather shoes are produced, and the final products are shipped back to US]

(b) “Leather has always been a byproduct of the meat industry, and as Americans’ beef consumption grew over the 20th century, the leather industry grew with it. The past three decades, though, have seen a decline of about 28 percent in Americans’ appetite for beef, and the supply of hides has dwindled accordingly. At the same time, drought in the Midwest has pushed up feed prices. The result is that America has fewer and more expensive cows. Meanwhile, the world’s consumers still want leather goods.

(c) “A typical steer weighs from 1,300 to 1,400 pounds. Its carcass yields about 850 pounds of meat, which sells wholesale for an average of $2,300, according to the US Department of Agriculture. The hide sells for about $100, making it a mere 4.3 percent of the value of the animal. * * * Leather in all its forms [as raw material]—the aspirational $10,000 Hermès bag, the $6,000 upgrade package in a Mercedes, the $120 New Balance sneaker—is the wrapper [not worth much; cheap] around what will become someone else’s Big Mac.

“For thousands of years, this byproduct was vegetable-tanned: The skins would soak in natural tannins for several weeks until they pickled to the texture of what we think of as leather. There’s an equally long history of people using tanned leather for apparel, but until the Industrial Revolution, the material was used sparingly. As a rule, the only people clothed in hide were people surrounded by cattle. American Indians had a surfeit of bison and wore leather apparel for centuries. In Western society, leather didn’t go mainstream until after World War I, and it was only in the 1950s that ‘leather became much more available,’ says Michelle Finamore, a curator of fashion arts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

“This was the result of America’s embrace of factory farming. By the mid-1970s, there were 140 million head of cattle in the US—more than one cow for every woman in the country. Cattle totals began to decrease in the 1980s, as ranchers got better at making their cows fatter faster, and Americans started reevaluating red meat. In 1985 there were almost 110 million head of cattle, according to the USDA, and the average American ate 79 pounds of beef a year. By 2009 the cattle population had dropped 32 percent, and Americans consumed just 61 pounds of beef each.

Note:
(a) Lisa "Howlett’s company, Auburn Leather, in Auburn, Ky"

Auburn, Kentucky
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auburn,_Kentucky
(The city's "name was changed in the 1860s to honor [City of] Auburn, New York")
(b) cattle
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle
(section 3 Terminology: A castrated male is called a steer in the United States; older steers are often called bullocks in other parts of the world, but in North America this term refers to a young bull)
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沙发
 楼主| 发表于 5-31-2015 17:53:25 | 只看该作者
(2) Kevin Hamlin, China Backpedals on Fiscal Reforms.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... cal-reform-reversed

My comment:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: Facing a weakened economy, the government lets borrowing resume
(b) Read only the first two paragraphs.

(3) Christopher Spillane and Matthew Campbell, After a $66 Billion Win, Trying for an Encore.
washpost.bloomberg.com/Story?docId=1376-NOMR5R6JTSEG01-514BL51899FAH6DPNRAHFVO69I
("South African billionaire Koos Bekker * * * in 2001 Naspers Ltd, the media group he chairs, put $32 million into a then-obscure Web company called Tencent. Its stake today is worth $66 billion -- roughly equal to Naspers’ [current] entire stock market capitalization")

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: Koos Bekker bet right on Tencent. Now he’s seeking another startup
(b) The quotation is likely all you need to know from this report.
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