Fairchild Semiconductor, a leading global supplier of high performance products, has opened a regional fulfillment center located in the Suzhou Logistics Center. This free trade zone logistics center has the capability to meet the requirements of China customs allowing direct shipments from Fairchild to China-based customers.

The regional fulfillment center provides a more environmentally friendly, energy efficient supply chain, by reducing total transportation fuel requirements that will result in shorter cycle times.

Robin Goodwin, Fairchild’s senior vice president, Supply Chain Management said, ‘This new logistic center marks the beginning of an exceptional opportunity for Fairchild. We’re able to provide our customers with better, faster and improved fulfillment services. We’re now shipping our products from our facilities in China, directly to local customers, without exporting them and then shipping them back. We’re very happy to offer our customers in China faster delivery time and vastly improved delivery performance.’

Fairchild’s 1,000 square meters, fully bonded warehouse has temperature and humidity control. It segregates inventory and transactions as well as activities and shipments and material from Fairchild’s manufacturing facility for delivery to local customers in China, and throughout the world.

In addition to managing delivery of products from Fairchild’s direct facilities, the company can also manage the subcontractor activities; products built by local companies can also be shipped directly to local and worldwide customers through the new fulfillment center.
Source: BusinessWire

Every time a government gets involved in business it gets a rush of acronyms to the head and does not explain them. Take NETDA as an example. It has a wonderful site but nowhere does it explain what NETDA means.

Eventually you discover that the Nantong Export Processing Zone (NTEPZ) is situated in Nantong Economic and Technological Development Area (NETDA).

NETDA is a state level development area with a planned eventual area of 2.98 square kilometers. The NTPEZ is close to the estuary of Yangtze River, and only eight kilometers to the new Suzhou-NangtongChangjiang Bridge which is under construction so that it is strategically positioned at the Gateway of the Yangtze River.

For logistics there could be not better position.

Ports along China`s coastline and famous ports worldwide can be reached via the river and seas; going up-stream along the river can get you to the provinces of Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan and Sichuan, and further to Yunnan, Guizhou, Shaanxi and Henan.
As far as roads are concerned NETDA has links with Shanghai-Nanjing and Yanjiang Express-ways to its south and links with Nanjing-Nantong Expressway and the Yancheng -Nantong and Nantong -Qidong Expressways to its north.

NETDA is 100 km away from Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport, 150 km from Shanghai Pudong International Airport and 240 km from Nanjing Lukou Airport.

This is probably one of the top 10 development zones in China but it is not widely known because it is, perhaps, seen as part of the greater Shanghai connurbation.

There are plus points As an extension to Shanghai Port, direct customs- clearance station via water transport is in operation.

NETDA implements the system of in-advance declaration and in-advance on-line for processing trade. A computer system has been established to connect the Customs with the enterprises in NETDA through the Internet.
Source: NETDA

While there is considerable disagreement about the direction industry should travel in using clean and renewable energy solar power is certainly one of the directions.

An example is that the world’s largest semiconductor producer Applied Materials has tapped into its solar power generation capacity in Xi’an, capital city of northwest China’s Sha’anxi Province.

The newly-inaugurated installation guarantees an annual power capacity of over 65 megawatt hours, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions of more than 65 tons per year. It is the first of its kind at an existing corporate facility in Western China.

Now the rest of the industrial zone is following this lead.

An official of Hi-tech Industrial Development Zone of Xi’an City of Shaanxi Province said ‘The city has attached great importance to developing clean and renewable energy. We are now improving related policies to encourage its development. As for the industrial sector, we will not approve projects with high-energy consumption and bad pollution.’

China has abundant sunlight resources. The volume of solar radiation taken up by the land surface is equivalent to 4.9 trillion tons of standard coal. Two thirds of China’s land areas have over 2,200 hours of sunlight a year. With around 26 million people who have no access to electricity, there is great potential in China for the development of solar industry. But bear in mind that those are theoretical figures and actual results are likely to be quite different. There is also a considerable expenditure of energy in making the solar panels.

China has set a target for its domestic solar photovoltaic market to reach up to 400 megawatts by 2010 which would be about 10%.

The country also plans to have hydropower projects with an installed capacity of 190 million kilowatts, and wind power projects with installed capacity of 10 million kilowatts.
Source: CCTV.com

The Taihu Lake district got into trouble when nearly a year ago there was blue-green algae outbreak in the lake. This disrupted water supply to two million residents in Wuxi, Jiangsu province.

The measures that were taken seem to be working. Many manufacturing enterprises, at the urging of the provincial and city governments, have taken difficult and costly measures to cut down on industrial pollution.

Li Yuanchao, head of the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the former Party Secretary of Jiangsu province said, ‘Excessive industrial development along the Taihu Lake area has taken a deadly toll on the environment. Strict environmental standards should be enforced to reduce pollution, even if that means a slowdown in growth. It’s the price we have to pay.’

The Jiangsu provincial environmental protection bureau issued what is considered the strictest environmental standard in the nation — DB32 Discharge Standard of Main Water Pollutants for Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant and Key Industries of Taihu Area — which took effect at the beginning of this year. DB32 leaves little room for compromise: enterprises either comply or get out.

Wuxi has played host to one of the nation’s most advanced and developed modern industrial zones. It enjoys a long history of industrial development, especially in textile and machine manufacturing, while printing, dyeing, plating and chemical industries mushroomed in the 1980s.

Growing environmental problems in recent years, such as the algae outbreak, have sounded a serious warning that the old pattern of growth simply can’t be sustained.

Now matters are changing. Statistics from the municipal economic and trade committee show some 600 small chemical companies were closed down in 2007. Other sectors like metallurgy, printing and dyeing, plating and cement are also facing the heat.

Qin Jueming, chief of staff of the environmental watchdog said, ‘Companies will have to do preliminary treatment if the content of pollutants in the wastewater proves high. If they don’t do it, they will simply be shut down.’
Source: China Daily

Thirty years ago this week, then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping pushed for the development of science and technology. Since then, China’s science and technology industry has found itself on a brand-new path.

Two decades ago, the first national, high-tech district, Beijing Zhongguancun Science Park, was established.

It was a response to the central government’s strategy to develop its high-tech industry. Since then, the park has developed into an advanced industrial area, leading the software, integrated circuit and computer industries in China. Over the past twenty years, Zhongguancun Science Park has maintained a more than 25% annual growth rate. And it accounts for 18% of Beijing’s GDP.

So far, China has set up 54 high-tech districts, concentrating the country’s high-tech talent. These districts have become efficient technology transfer areas and the most prolific contributors to Chinese science and technology.

Jing Gang, Working Committee Secretary of Chengdu High-Tech Industrial Development Zone said ‘We have stressed providing standardized, efficient and high-quality services to companies. We have also been sticking to the concept that industry development, especially that of the high-tech industry, is our lifeline. All our work is subject to the industry’s development.’

After decades of development, the national high-tech districts have formed into a newly-emerged industrial core with their own characteristics. They play a critical role in the regional economy and in the transformation of cities’ economic structure and development.
Source: CCTV International

ETDZ are an ugly collection of initials to which we need to get used. It is quicker writing Kunshan ETDZ then Kunshan Economic and Technological Development Zone. It has been around a while having been approved as state-level economic development zone in August 1992.

KETDZ — see, you are getting used to it already — is in the southeast of Jiangsu Province within the Yangtze River Delta. It has the cities of Changshu and Taicang in the north and northeast, Shanghai in the south and southeast, and Wujiang and Suzhou in the west.

Which gives it a pretty strategic position in that it is only 50 kilometers west of Shanghai and 37 kilometers east of Suzhou.

Which makes it about half an hour, if you are lucky with the traffic, to get by car to Shanghai Hongqiao Airport and an hour or so to cover the distance of 100 kilometers to Shanghai Pudong Airport.

KETDZ is 60 kilometers away from China’s biggest port, Port Shanghai, 100 kilometers from Port Zhangjiakang and 35 kilometers from Port Liujiagang in Taicang which puts it in a marvelous position for goods transportation especially as both the Beijing-Shanghai Railway and Shanghai-Nanjing expressway go across the zone.

There are three institutions of higher learning including Guihu University, 32 middle schools and 3 vocational schools in Kunshan.

The campuses of Kunshan University ready to open and Taiwan Minxin University of Science and Technology has been set up here. The city of Kunshan boasts a team of over 5,000 experts in a variety of fields and 200,000 skilled technical workers.
Which brings us to the changing face of zones. It is not that Kunshan totally rejects heavy industry — there appears to be nowhere that this is expressly stated — rather it is biased towards electronic components and precision machinery: centering on auto parts and components.

The key to all of industries in Kunshan is that they are environmentally friendly and feature high-tech input. And this seems to be the general trend among zones which are near cities. High tech is the way to go which is why we need to get used to those initials — ETDZ.
Source: National Economical and Technological Development Zones

Application has been made by the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southwest China for permission to construct a bonded port zone in Qinzhou city, the sixth such zone in the country.

Local news reports said the regional government had submitted the application to eight state governmental departments including the General Administration of Customs, the Ministry of Land and Resources and State Development and Reform Commission for founding the bonded port zones.

The application is widely expected to be formally approved by the State Council, and if it does, Qinzhou will join the bonded port zones of Shanghai Yangshan, Tianjin Dongjiang, Dalian Dayaowan, Hainan Yangpu Port and Zhejiang Meishan.

Guangxi is the province on Guangdong’s western border and close to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) became each other’s fourth-largest trading partners last year. Total bilateral trade between China and ASEAN grew 25.9% last year to $202.5 billion, with the trade between Guangxi and ASEAN topping $2.91 billion last year.

Ports in the Beibu Gulf handed 274,200 TEUs last year.

Guangxi plans to build Qinzhou city into an international shipping centre in 10-15 years.
Source: CargoNews Asia

The Tianjin Economic and Technological Development Area (TEDA) was established in December 1984 and was one of the first national-level development areas. Twelve years later, national strategy established the Tianjin Binhai New Area as a pilot area for implementing deepening reform.

In 2007, the Binhai New Area had a total output value of RMB236.4 billion, accounting for 47.1% of the total in Tianjin. It attracts investment from home and abroad.

Tianjin held a conference in March this year to discuss ‘emancipating the mind’ and requesting municipal officials to lead the way in developing Tianjin into a first-class developed city.

TEDA has ranked at the top for 10 consecutive years on a list from the Ministry of Commerce for its ‘comprehensive investment environment in China’s State-level economic and technological development zones’.

The Tianjin plan to establish a new economic outlook will include accelerating industrial improvements, enhancing innovation in science and technology, greater development of modern service industries, promoting development of the domestic economy, upgrading the overall service of the city.

In the past 20 years, the area has attracted globally known multinationals that have invested in modern manufacturing facilities, including Motorola from the US, Toyota from Japan and Samsung from South Korea.

In 2007, the total output value of the telecommunications, manufacturing and automotive industries exceeded RMB260 billion, accounting for 80% of the total.

In more recent years, modern service industries have moved into the area — foreign banks, investment companies, and software outsourcing enterprises.

Backing up these hopes and plans is the fact that Tianjin Port is the largest port in north China and handled 30 million tons of cargo in 2007, up 20.2% year-on-year.
In the same year the turnover of the 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of container increased by 19.4% to 7.103 million.

The port’s target is 330 million tons of freight traffic and 8.5 million (TEUs) of containers in 2008.
Sources: China Daily and China Daily

Guangdong, the wealthiest mainland China province, under the guidance of newly appointed provincial Communist Party chief Wang Yang, is considering, only considering mark you, whether to integrate with Hong Kong and Macau to form a special cooperative zone. This would be similar to a free trade area (FTA), with the ultimate aim of turning it into a ‘world-class metropolitan belt’.

Guangdong needs something like this as it loses its competitiveness through rapid increases in labor and land costs.

Wang Yang urged Guangdong officials to ‘further emancipate their minds’ and think of new ways to let Guangdong continue to lead other regions in opening up to the outside world.

That ‘To emancipate the mind’ is not a new phrase. It was used by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s to urge officials to break ideological shackles of and so pave the way for the launch of capitalist-style economic reforms.

In part because of its proximity to Hong Kong and Macau, Guangdong took the lead in the country’s reforms of the period, becoming the first province to benefit from Deng’s ‘opening-up’ policy.

Of the four special economic zones Beijing approved in 1980 to pilot market-oriented economic reforms, three — Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou — are in Guangdong. The only other one is Xiamen, in Fujian province, facing Taiwan.

As China has gradually opened other provinces, particularly after its entry into the World Trade Organization, Guangdong is increasingly facing challenges from other regions, in particular from the Yangtze River Delta led by Shanghai.

It is under such circumstances that Wang proposed closer ties with Hong Kong and Macau to form a special cooperative zone.

Ambitious and inspiring as the idea may be, the greatest challenge to its implementation would be how to find some way, or ways, to narrow the great differences between the political, economic and social systems in the three places. Under ‘one country two systems’, Hong Kong and Macau continue the systems they inherited from British and Portugal colonial rule.

But perhaps it is possible and 23 provincial authorities and think-tanks in Guangdong are now jointly conducting feasibility studies on forming the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau special cooperative zone.
Source: Asia Times Online

This is, as it were, part of a regular newsletter which tells how Chengdu is doing. Chengdu Investment News tells us that amorphous silicon solar cell project worth RMB600 million will be put into construction this July at Chongzhou Industrial Development Zone. Its main investor is Sichuan Guangliang Investment subordinate to Sichuan Kaimai Group.

The company will complete the building of the first production line within a year and of all the construction items within 30 months. The annual capacity of amorphous silicon solar cell will reach 300 megawatt by then, the biggest in China, with RMB45 million taxes to be paid annually.

So what are we talking about?

A solar cell is a device that converts solar energy into electricity by the photovoltaic effect. Assemblies of cells are used to make solar modules, which may in turn be linked in photovoltaic arrays.

Solar cells have many applications. Individual cells are used for powering small devices such as electronic calculators.

Photovoltaic arrays generate a form of renewable electricity, particularly useful in situations where electrical power from the grid is unavailable such as in remote area power systems, Earth-orbiting satellites and space probes, remote radiotelephones and water pumping applications. Photovoltaic electricity is also increasingly deployed in grid-tied electrical systems. However, you would need more than a few systems to light up Chunxilu in Chengdu shown in our illustration.)

So why amorphous?

Silicon comes in two types, crystalline and amorphous. One of the main advantages of amorphous, over crystalline silicon relies in its production technique, as thin films of it can be deposited over large areas.

Because fuel cells have no moving parts and do not involve combustion, in ideal conditions they can achieve up to 99.9999% reliability. Thus if they can also produce 300 megawatt you have seriously useful power.

And moving from the most modern of technology to the use of something which has been with us for centuries.

Chengdu’s technology of high-strength bamboo-type material which took eight years and cost nearly RMB10 milion. Ci Bamboo commonly seen in villages of Sichuan, has good tenacity and well-built fiber framework, whose endwise tensile strength is 5 to 6 times than that of carbon steel. After machining it becomes high-strength bamboo-quality molding material, with properties of high density, strong rigidity, good wear-resistance, waterproof, moisture proof as well as mothproof. It also weight much less than the equivalent in steel and is therefore called ‘vegetable steel’. One estimate is that using the Sichuan Ci Bamboo to make the high-strength bamboo-quality material could bring out an industry of RMB20 billion a year.

Finally a no-paper declaration is expected to be applied widely within the year at Chengdu Export Processing Zone. In practice, the export company only needs to fill in the customs declaration form on-line, and the customs e-system will examine and verify those digital data; later on the company can print through the e-port platform the Notice of Customs Check and Release Permit returned by the customs authorities, and then ask for checking pass at the port with real products.

It is reported that according to the early trials, the ‘direct’ mode of declaration, made Intel (Chengdu) company’s finished products pass through the customs in five minutes after completing the on-line declaration, saving 83% of time. Just like the non-use of airline tickets this can save a vast amount of paper.

Newsletters like this, letting the world how an industrial zone is progressing is a wonderful idea. We should see more of it.
Source: All Roads Lead to China