China Approves import of Qualified Argentina Sorghum

China AQSIQ said, China approved the import of qualified Argentina sorghum. As the World's second largest exporter of sorghum, following US and Australia, Argentina has become the third country to export sorghum to China.

This may make sorghum from US encounter competition, the United States is the world's largest exporter of sorghum. Chinese feed mills buy more sorghum instead of corn, because sorghum is cheaper.

On November 26, China AQSIQ issued a statement, saying that inspection and quarantine departments of the two countries signed the "Protocol of phytosanitary requirements on Argentine sorghum exported to China". Since November 3, imports of qualified Argentine sorghum would be allowed. (www.chinainout.com)

287 Batches of Imported Food Fail to Pass Inspection and Testing of CIQ in October

China AQSIQ announced on the 27th, 287 batches of imported food failed to pass inspection and testing of CIQ in October.

The director of press office of Information Office of AQSIQ, Li Jing said, in October, 287 batches of imported food and 4 batches of cosmetics failed to pass the inspection and testing of CIQ.

Substandard food products involved 17 categories, which were mainly sugar, drinks and pastries biscuits, from 34 countries or regions, the unqualified label, substandard quality and substandard food additives were the main reason for failure.

Substandard cosmetics involved three categories, namely, skin cosmetics, perfume cosmetics and other cosmetics, from four countries, the unqualified certificate, ban restricted substances, substandard packaging and labeling were the main reasons. (www.chianinout.com)

Can Chinese Economy Buck up?

What would China look like if it were growing at just 2 per cent a year? That sounds like a ridiculously pessimistic question given China’s performance in the past three decades. Certainly, it has manifold problems. Indeed, its economy is already slowing. But what misadventure could possibly bring its growth rate crashing down so spectacularly?

That is the wrong question, according to an influential paper by US economists Lant Pritchett and Lawrence Summers . For them, “the single most robust and striking fact” about growth is “regression to the mean” of about 2 per cent. only rarely in modern history, they say, have countries grown at “super-rapid” rates above 6 per cent for much more than a decade. China has managed to buck the trend since 1977 by harnessing market forces, engineering possibly the longest spell “in the history of mankind”. But what goes up, the authors tell us, must eventually come down.

They have trawled through the data and drawn two powerful conclusions. One is that there is almost no statistical basis for predicting growth from one decade to another. Extrapolation is a mug’s game – or, as they put it, “current growth has very little predictive power”. From 1967 to 1980, Brazil grew at an average annual rate of 5.2 per cent. Few would have predicted, then, that for the next 22 years per capita income would grow at precisely zero.

Their second finding is that episodes of super-rapid growth last a median of nine years. China is the big exception. The only countries with fast-growth episodes that come close are Taiwan and South Korea, which managed 32 and 29 years respectively. According to the authors, once such episodes end, the median dro in growth is 4.65 points. That would cut China’s growth to 4 per cent and India’s to 1.6 per cent – far lower than almost anyone is predicting.

The thesis has huge potential ramifications, both economic and geopolitical. If China and India continue their current growth trajectories, their combined gross domestic product will rise to $66tn by 2033, against $11tn today. If they regressed fully to mean, they would reach a combined GDP of just $24tn. The authors have no need to explain why China’s, or indeed India’s, growth should fall so precipitously. This is just what happens. Their reasoning puts the onus on optimists to explain otherwise.

There are several conceivable rejoinders. The first applies to emerging markets generally. The idea of “convergence” holds that poor countries can grow faster than rich ones. That is partly because there is low-hanging fruit; for example, moving people from unproductive rural jobs to more productive urban ones. Poor countries can also copy rich ones; they do not have to reinvent the wheel. Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard University, refers to “six killer apps of prosperity”: competition, scientific revolution, property rights, medicine, consumer society and the work ethic. Since we already know what they are, they can be “downloaded”. Several Asian economies, including Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore have more or less caught up with western living standards. If they can do it, why not others? Regression to mean, however, implies that such speedy catch-up is impossible, or at least very difficult.

Is there anything about China specifically that suggests it could buck the trend? First, it has already done so, growing rapidly for more than 30 years. The two economists say this makes a rapid slowdown more likely. But perhaps it is the reverse. Chinese leaders may have learnt how to beat the odds. Second, as Jim O’Neill, who coined the term Brics, says, the authors’ data may be skewed by the mostly disappointing economies of Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. Perhaps Asian economies have discovered a secret sauce. Third, China’s long-lived expansion follows many decades of chaos and suboptimal growth. What we are seeing now could plausibly be a long-pent-up recovery – the country’s own regression to mean. Fourth, China’s size could confer growth-sustaining advantages in terms of economies of scale and size of domestic market. If true, that would also apply to India.

 (www.chinainout.com)

Ministry of Commerce: Value Trade’s Effect on Economic Growth Stabilize Exports and Encourage Imports

On the 18th, the Ministry of Commerce held a regular press conference, the Ministry of Commerce spokesman Shen Danyang, said at the press conference, the world economic recovery was weaker than the expected this year, thus Chinese government adopted a series of steady growth, structural adjustment measures to promote economic growth and make a contribution to the global economic recovery. Shen Danyang added that only in the business area, we took measures of five aspects in order to make exports, consumption and investment fully function and boost economic growth.

Shen Danyang said the first was to focus on and deepen the reform and opening up of key areas and key links, such as Shanghai FTA establishment and simplified procedures of foreign investment. Second was to expand consumer demand, retail sales of the first 10 months increased by 12%, which was not easy. In fact, consumption contributed most to economic growth, while in the past it was investment. Third, to promote the steady growth of foreign trade and structural adjustment. Whether export or import, although the growth rate might not reach many people's expectations, but China's foreign trade performed best among the world's major economies.

Shen Danyang introduced the coordination between "bringing in" and "going out". We would not only stable foreign investment, but also kept foreign investment rapid growth. Finally, we strengthened the open multilateral and bilateral cooperation, and reached a series of new free trade agreements. We completed FTA substantive negotiations relatively with Australia and South Korea. We achieved steady growth in household consumption, import and export growth steady rise, the rapid growth of foreign investment and cooperation, thus stabilizing the growth of China's economy and contributing to global economic growth.

Shen Danyang said that economic growth was the G20 Summit's core concerns, at the 2010 Toronto summit the goal sustainable and balanced growth was proposed. Australia, as chair of this year, proposed additional growth 2% in the next five years as the G20's growth targets, in order to further boost the global economy. For this reason the members have also made specific policy measures and implementation path.

China also prepared and presented a more comprehensive growth strategy report. For example, China would attach great importance to trade effects on growth, and made a comprehensive trade policy commitments in the growth strategy report, including stabilizing exports and encouraging imports, in the world few countries would encourage imports. Trade in goods, trade in services, trade liberalization and facilitation, innovative business models were also included, such as the cross-border e-commerce business model. Shen Danyang believed that China's commitment to promote trade development, would help support the Chinese economy to achieve strong, sustainable and balanced growth, which also fully embodied China’s contribution and support to the G20. (www.chinainout.com)

Era Comes That "World's Population Aged 6 And Over to Have Mobile Phones"

While the concept of 6-year-olds texting one another from across the playground or placing calls from kindergarten cubbies may sound like a hilarious premise, it’s also a stunning inevitability of our burgeoning mobile age.

The Swedish communications giant Ericsson has released a new mobility report claiming that, by the year 2020, 90 percent of the world’s population aged 6 years and over will have mobile phones. At that point, Ericsson estimates total smartphone subscriptions will number 6.1 billion; there are an estimated 2.7 million total smartphone subscribers today.

And the 6-year-olds in question aren’t merely inheritors of their parents’ defunct devices that exclusively run apps and games. The report’s executive editor, Patrick Cerwall, told Entrepreneur that the figure had been calculated by looking at active phones connected to a network.

The report was chock full of other eye-popping finds. The fastest areas of growth for new mobile subscriptions, Ericsson said, are India and China. Additionally, video is the largest and fastest-growing segment of mobile data traffic, comprising 45 to 55 percent of all 4G-dominated networks.

Finally, with the commercial deployment of 5G — the next generation of mobile standards — by 2020, subscriptions are bound to increase even faster, just as 4G caused a greater spike in subscriptions than 3G, Ericsson said. (www.chinainout.com)

IBM Ex-CEO Peng Mingsheng: How A Truly Global Company Tempered

In 2011, as IBM was planning to commemorate its 100th anniversary, it struck me that therewere dramatic parallels between the company’s transformation over 10 decades and the wayin which the global economy had been transformed over the same period. Both had benefitedfrom an expansion of economic growth, and an increase in living standards, that was withoutprecedent in human history. This progress had been greatly enabled by the integration ofglobal society, and through the power and prevalence of information technology.

Today, global economic integration presents enormous opportunity for the future ofbusiness and society. For business, buying and selling goods and services in a global marketcan lead to cost savings and increased revenue, but also the ability to draw on the talents andinsights of a global workforce. Society can also benefit in a myriad of ways, from individualsrealizing higher living standards to governments realizing new avenues for cooperation. Andwhile many point to the risks of integration, the more pressing and more pragmaticquestions are the following: How do we deal with the future? Do we embrace it? Or do we clingto the past?

These questions are particularly important for companies in the United States and throughoutthe world. They face new challenges as they navigate what is the first truly global era inhuman history – an era in which the volume and speed of information, people, products,services and ideas being circulated around the world is greater than ever before. wher qualityservices will be delivered via cloud-like platforms and consistency of shareholder returns will bemandatory. This new era calls for new business models, new corporate structures, newinvestor engagement and new thinking.

Fundamental to the global era, and uniquely suited to benefit from it, is what I call the globallyintegrated enterprise (GIE), which refers to companies that are truly global (as opposed to“multinational”) in their management and their operations. In this model, work is organized infundamentally different ways. It calls for different skills and behaviors, more collaboration andtransparency, more disciplined financial management, greater focus on a multiplicity ofcultural differences, and less hierarchy.

As an example, decisions about wher to locate operations are based on how to maximizevalue for customers, employees, and business partners. Instead of taking people to wher thework is, you take work to wher the people are. Thus, rather than maintaining separate supplychains in different markets, there is one supply chain, and it’s global — not just for products,but also services, capital, ideas, and intellectual property.

Similarly, human capital is thought of not in terms of countries and regions and business units,but rather how to manage and deploy it as one global asset. While CEO, I saw that IBM’s IBM-0.02% future was going to be focused on innovation, which meant that rather than beingcapital-intensive, we were going to be human capital-intensive – delivering software andservices. So it was even more important than in the past that we hired and retained the bestpeople. But unlike earlier eras, it didn’t really matter wher these people were or wher theycame from – we simply wanted them to excel in their work at IBM and we wanted to do whatwe could to help them excel.

In connection with our global workforce, we recognized the need to create a common culturethat would ensure consistent values throughout the company, regardless of wher ouremployees were working (that’s the “integrated” part of GIE). To that end, we conducted acompany-wide survey – what we called a “ValuesJam” – that gave anyone working for IBM theopportunity to weigh in on what the company should stand for and how our employees shouldoperate. That exercise culminated with an updated set of values that became the connectivetissue for IBMers throughout the world.

For a company to become a GIE, its leaders must embrace a particular frame of mind – onethat I worked to imbue in my colleagues while I was CEO of IBM. This frame of mind is focusedon how to operate seamlessly as a single organic entity – by integrating internal operationshorizontally and globally, collaborating with external partners, and operating at the bestlocation in the world, to maximize value creation from a global point of view.

IBM is far from the only company that has adopted key GIE principles and practices. A numberof companies, operating across a diverse set of countries and industries, have implementedmeasures that resemble those we adopted at IBM. They include CemexCX -0.16% of Mexico, aleading producer of cement and other building materials; Bharti Airtel of India, one of theworld’s most dynamic cellular telephone providers; and Geely of China, which is making majorinroads in the global car industry thanks to innovative products and management. Themeasures they’ve implemented are a byproduct of their own experiences, which led them toreach the same conclusions we did at IBM: that companies need to be global in order to staycompetitive, but need to do so in ways that keep them close to their customers while alsoemphasizing values and principles that foster agility, innovation, and productivity.

The GIE, and the new global era for business, are at the center of my current work. My book,Re-Think: A Path to the Future, was published earlier this year. These areas represent thefoundation of work being undertaken by the Center for Global Enterprise (CGE), which is aresearch organization I launched last year. Its work is being devoted to explaining the age inwhich we are living, while also documenting how a new management science is emerging, howleaders can apply it, and how all stakeholders should strive to maximize its benefits. (www.chinainout.com)