NY Times article "The Classical British Sports Car from China" by Craig S. Smith:
MG, the legendary British brand that expired after a lengthy illness, will be revived this month as a Chinese sports car when the Nanjing Automobile Corporation begins to produce convertible sports cars under that name in China...
...The investment agency that China is setting up to diversify its $1.1 trillion foreign exchange holdings could provide another boost, particularly as the government sees the entire world — including developing countries in Africa and Latin America — as its stage for acquisitions.
It began when the Chinese television and mobile telephone maker TCL bought the bankrupt Schneider Electronics of Germany in 2002. The computer maker Lenovo acquired I.B.M.’s troubled personal computer business in 2004.
Now, China Qianjiang Group, the largest motorcycle manufacturer in China, owns Benelli, the oldest motorcycle manufacturer in Italy. Shenyang Machine Tool Group has bought the 140-year-old German machine tool maker Schiess. Xinjiang Chalkis, a tomato producer, even owns a French tomato cannery and sells Chinese tomato sauce in Provence. All of those target companies were facing financial crises.
Many of China’s foreign purchases have been focused on energy resources, dominated by big state-owned enterprises like the national oil giants PetroChina and Cnooc, which have spent billions in recent years acquiring oil and natural gas fields. Those deals have helped swell the value of China’s foreign acquisitions to nearly $14 billion on more than 100 deals last year, from just $18.6 million in 1990, according to Thomson Financial, which tracks global investment trends....
Thomas Barnett comments in his post "What China will do with its money is what all people do with their money: use it to make them rich:"
...China’s government is now encouraging outbound FDI, which only increases the economy’s dense financial connectivity with the outside world, subjecting Beijing to more and more rules. It’s a totally natural progression, threatening only poorly run companies, who, quite frankly, should be devoured by somebody rather than linger and bring our economy down--however tangentially.
China’s playing up. We can look down in fear, or we can look up ourselves and get on with it.
Fear is always the choice of the lazy.
Jobs aren’t eternal. Talent is.
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