China Business Blog and Podcast

Modern Materials Handling has an article that features Jim Tompkins, president & CEO of Tompkins Associates, and Technomic Asia’s Steve Ganster.

A quick excerpt:

U.S. companies planning to build their success on domestic markets alone will be gone in five years. That’s Jim Tompkins’ opinion, anyway. As president & CEO of Tompkins Associates, he sees an opportunity for U.S. companies to take advantage of the changing demographics among China’s 1.3 billion people.

The article also includes this quote from Steve:

“In 20 years [China's] economy will be as big as the U.S. Automotive will be as big or bigger in less time than that. Warehousing and land costs are going up, as are labor costs, and it will push them to more automation,” [Ganster said.]

Read the full article on MMH.com.

Some insight from Technomic Asia’s Kent Kedl is included in a Time magazine article about China’s entry restrictions for people traveling from Hong Kong.

From the Time article:

Since Hong Kong’s return to China from Britain in 1997, entry to the mainland has become even easier and faster—visas are processed with great speed and little hassle, making entry points into Shenzhen, the booming megalopolis adjacent to Hong Kong, among the busiest in the world. But all this has been upset in recent weeks: the Chinese government has mysteriously stopped issuing multiple-entry visas—an essential tool for Hong Kong’s doing business with China—in a move that has sparked confusion and frustration.

[...]

Most China analysts, though, expect these difficulties to disappear after the Olympics. “They’re having a few jitters, but China isn’t going to cut off its nose to spite its face,” says Kent Kedl, a consultant at Technomic Asia, a Shanghai-based market strategy firm. Plans are already afoot to give Hong Kong permanent residents of any nationality visa-free access to the mainland within the next few years, the kind of privilege that millions of Asians who work in the West can only dream about. “Getting my Chinese staff to the U.S. is an absolute nightmare,” says Kedl. “Let’s have a bit of perspective.”

Read the full story on Time’s Web site.