China decides to cook its own chips – report Chinese government-owned Tsinghua Unigroup, having failed to buy Micron, is going to make its own memory chips. The WSJ reports that TU will spend $12bn-plus to build a fab and make acquisitions. It's being positioned as part of China's long term goal of being less dependent on Western technology. The acquisitions will be …
Whilst the west is concentrating on shutting down it's nuclear power stations China is finally learning the importance of cheap clean fuel. Soon it will be in a position to close down western markets and, no longer having to supply western customers, how many years will it take them to go after the west's customers themselves?
Ten or fifteen?
Then the stone hits the feet of clay or is it a Chinese fan?
"close down western markets and, no longer having to supply western customers". I am not sure I understand that sentence. But Wikipedia tells us this:
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China)
"As of December 2014, the People's Republic of China has 23 nuclear power reactors operating with a capacity of 19GW and 26 under construction with a capacity of 25.7 GW"......and this should reach 88 by the end of 2020."
As for "going after western customers" the one to be built in Britain, as I have understood, is a joint French-Chinese project. (A fair amount of funny comments about that on ElReg). China has worked with France on nuclear power for years, like with the USA and Russia.
@stuart 22,
I agree, but do we need a sentence like "China has an openly interventionist national technology and industry policy". China had an industry long before Europe and has never had any intentions of not expanding it into the future, why should they. Should we not rather construct a nice sentence describing what has happened to the British industry.
China has an openly interventionist national technology and industry policy. This appears to run alongside an uncontrolled wild west capitalist system. Some may see some synergy between the two.
Meanwhile the UK government has retreated from similar policies and our involvement (with a few, very few, exceptions) in the technology and industry market has followed suit. But they probably can't touch us on wild west money laundering (sorry I meant financial services).
Which will look to be the smarter decision in 20 years time?
It is expensive to manufacture in India: too much corruption!! Even worse than china.. and when you have to effectively pay "protection money" "pizzo" "lecgal surcharges" or whatever you want to call it, things get expensive very quickly.
As corruption in India seems to be fixed as soon as we have electric Fusion Power, I don't really think India is a serious contender for China. Maybe smaller countries that can be dominated by big corps are a better target for them.
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