Drug store

Earlier this year NW Tech Capital sent a delegation to China to seek out merger and acquisition opportunities. Formerly known as Cybertel Capital Corp, NWTT is a technology base provider to national and regional businesses and other consumers in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

On its site it states: Our Mission Statement is to become the leader in voice and data telecom products and services in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

Now NW Tech Capital, apparently ignoring its mission statement, has increased its stake in the Zhuhai Jialun Guangcai Chain Drug Store — this has a majority interest in the 400 ZJG Drugstores based in Guangdong Province — by the additional acquisition of software currently in use by over 2,000 drug stores in China.

Guangcai is a program for the management of drugstores, wholesalers and  manufacturers. The software is used by over 2,000 chain drugstores in Guangdong Province.

The enterprise software was developed by the founders of ZJG Drugstores.
Source: MarketWatch

The State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) has agreed to purchase software from Kingsoft which means Microsoft misses out.

Kingsoft will supply all divisions of the State Grid Corporation throughout the country, as well as its 21 subsidiaries, with China-made office software. Chinese government agencies have reportedly warned that depending too much on foreign-made software could be a security hazard.

This news would not have made Steve Ballmer of Microsoft happy.

Kingsoft is confident that its WPS Office software is equal to any of its kind.

SGCC, established in 2002 has a registered capital of RMB200 billion and a brief to build and operate power grids and secure power supplies in 26 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities.
Source: China Update

China’s annual output value topped RMB 583.4 billion ($84.5 billion) in 2007, making it the world’s fourth largest software producer.

Fourth in the world sounds like a very strong position but the general view is there is still a long way to go.

Lou Qinjian, Industry and Information Technology vice minister and seen in our illustration, said at the International Software China 2008 show that the Chinese software industry had started from scratch since the country began its reform and opening-up three decades ago. It had grown into a fundamental industry with strategic importance to the country.

The country’s share of the global software industry rose from 1.2% in 2000 to 8.7 percent in 2007, with an annual growth rate of more than 30%.

Cao Jianlin, Science and Technology vice minister, said the country should make an even bigger effort in innovation and personnel training to sustain the industry’s long-term healthy development.

The International Software China 2008 was held in Beijing and focused on industrial policy planning, industrial standards, software technologies and development, investment and financing and enterprise personnel recruiting.
Source: Window of China

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reports China’s software exports surged in the first four months of this year, due largely to technological innovation.

Between January and April, exports totaled $3.27 billion, up 54.9% year-on-year.

Software exports grew from $720 million in 2001 to $10.24 billion in 2007.

The ministry said the sector’s income was RMB583.4 billion ($82 billion) in 2007, up 630% from 2001. Chinese software accounted for 8.7% of the global industry last year, up from 1.5% in 2001.

According to the ministry, the software sector’s revenue was RMB193.55 in the January-April period, up 31.2%.

In a very real sense this is the most amazing news about Chinese exports that has been published in these pages.

Software is typically written in code but that code is most often based on English. And the slightest slip means matters go very askew.

So the Chinese coders are working in, as it were, a double foreign language, and still have managed to get a substantial part of the world market. The mind boggles. The illustration is part of a demonstration being given by Microsoft.
Source: Jongo News

The National Copyright Administration (NCA) states that China saw a 53% increase in the number of firms using copyrighted software in the past few months. No comment was made as to why the figure has risen so sharply over such a short period.

In April 2006, NCA with eight other ministries jointly issued a circular promoting legal use of software among large companies.

The government ordered municipal and local authorities to buy computers with pre-installed legitimate software and required all domestic and imported computers to be sold with legitimate software pre-installed to prevent software piracy at source.

Liu Binjie, director of the General Administration of Press told a conference in Dec. 2007 that central and provincial governments had investigated 3,600 enterprises. And more than 1,100 companies faced penalties for using pirated software, .

Microsoft projected in April last year a 20% rise for the year’s sales in China due to a combination of government anti-piracy efforts and new products.

China’s software industry registered a 23.1% rise in sales from RMB390 billion ($52.77 billion in 2005 to RMB480 billion in 2006.

Statistics from the Supreme People’s Court indicate that Chinese courts handled 769 IPR cases in 2006 and prosecuted 1,212 offenders, up 52.2% and 62.21%, respectively, from 2005.

The top court last April stated that anyone who manufactures 500 or more counterfeit copies (discs) of computer software, music, movies, TV series and other audio-video products can be prosecuted and imprisoned for up to seven years.

The new rules also widen the definition of a ’serious IPR offender’ — anyone who produces more than 2,500 counterfeit copies — can now be jailed for up to seven years.

Source: China View

Microsoft’s recent jump in Windows sales can be traced in part to a basic concept — getting more people who use its programs to pay for them.

The company says efforts to curb software piracy have added to its revenue in each of its last two quarters, helping it exceed Wall Street’s expectations.

One analyst says the trend may add a cumulative total of more than $1 billion to Microsoft’s PC Windows revenue over five years.

Microsoft said last week that anti-piracy initiatives in developing nations were part of the reason it saw a spike in Windows revenue during its latest quarter.

Chris Liddell, the company’s chief financial officer, in a call with analysts said the piracy reduction ‘has been a very good trend and it certainly, in the last two to three quarters, has picked up from what we’ve seen in the previous two to three years.’
Liddell credited factors including a spate of legal actions against software counterfeiters in more than 20 countries.

This is all being announced by Microsoft as if it were news. It is not. Microsoft, from its very beginning, has been focussed on extracting more money from the product by fighting the copying of programs.

Back in 1975 the January issue of Popular Electronics described the Altair 8800. Bill Gates and his then partner Paul Allen wrote a form of Altair BASIC and this was the start of Microsoft.

Microsoft’s BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Bill Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the community and was being widely copied and distributed.

In February 1976, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that MITS could not continue to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment.

We can therefore date this anti-piracy campaign quite accurately from February 1976 (even though the company was then called Micro-soft) and continuing unabated to this day.

It was an obsession with Bill Gates and thus became an obsession with Microsoft. And in some places like China it is working.

Last summer, for example, Microsoft and the Chinese government announced the bust of a counterfeiting syndicate that the company called the largest it had ever seen — responsible for distributing more than $2 billion in pirated programs.

Also in China, major PC vendors have made commitments to ship computers with legal software preinstalled, and the Chinese government has made a push to use legal software itself.
Source: Seattle PI

At a conference on software copyright issues, Liu Binjie, director of the General Administration of Press and shown here, said more than 1,500 large Chinese enterprises have installed copyrighted software since April 2006.

In April 2006, the National Copyright Administration and seven other ministries issued a joint notice urging Chinese companies to use copyrighted software.

Central and provincial governments have investigated 3,600 enterprises and more than 1,100 companies have faced penalties for using pirated software.

Vice Premier Wu Yi, also leader of a national working group for intellectual property protection, said in a congratulatory letter to the conference that software industry was a ‘basic and strategic sector’ of the national economic development.

Wu Yi said the use of copyrighted software to create a healthy and standard market environment is very important to develop the software industry. She reiterated that departments concerned should to take ‘forceful’ measures to promote the use of copyrighted software.

China also adopted regulations in 2006 requiring computers made in China, or imported for sale, to be pre-loaded with legitimate operating systems.
Source: China View

Steve Ballmer at Microsoft can be quite eccentric at times — although in fairness he is apparently an unassuming family man who is a decent cove — and the mention of the operating system Linux makes him come over strange.

The problem is Linux is mainly free and Linux works on personal computers. Works quite well. In fact, a lot better than the original version of Microsoft Vista which was as slow as Annie, the asthmatic ant with a heavy load of shopping. It has improved but much remains to be done.

On Linux Ballmer is not rational. As he said to the Chicago Sun-Times, ‘Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.’

(It is not just Linux that gets him going. This report from the Sydney Morning Herald, a newspaper with which I was once associated, suggests he is not keen on Google either: ‘I’m going to f—ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f—ing kill Google.’ He has not succeeded yet. Perhaps he should try harder.)

What really, really upsets Steve Ballmer is that Novell, a major distributor of the Linux operating system, expects its revenue from China to more than double this year as the open-source software continues to gain ground.

Chang Sen-ming, managing director of Novell East Asia said, ‘A number of our customers have chosen to buy upgrade services for their existing Linux systems this year. That will help us to outpace the average market growth here.’

This is the sort of thing that would make a chap throw a chair around the office although Ballmer swears he never did any such thing. Certainly not.

Novell is now one of the world’s largest distributors of the Linux operating system.

Presently, Novell generates most of its revenue from the server market as Microsoft’s Windows system still holds the lion’s share of the desktop segment. But in recent years, an increasing number of the world’s top PC makers have been embracing Linux, especially in China, where the government has required local PC makers to pre-install patented operating systems to reduce piracy. For Steve Ballmer that operating system has to be Microsoft Vista, even if Microsoft has to pay to get the computer makers to use it.

But Lenovo did Linux, has now been brought back to Windows. So has Dell. And, indeed, Dell has two support centers for Linux. According to a report by IT researcher IDC, China’s Linux market is projected to grow fivefold from 2006 to 2010 to $51.1 million. Enough to make a chap go into a monkey dance of frenzy.
Source: China.org.cn

Baidu is recruiting staff and making preparations to establish a R&D center in Shanghai.

William I. Chang, chief scientist of Baidu.com, and show in our illustration, has told local media that Baidu is preparing for the Shanghai R&D Center and it will be led by the company’s existing technicians with newly graduated college students as a complement.

As part of the preparation, Baidu is organizing a large scale recruitment at 25 universities in 15 cities across China. However, the company has not disclosed how many people it will recruit.

Apart from the Shanghai R&D Center, Baidu is reportedly preparing to also construct an R&D center in Tokyo.

Source: Jongo News

Neusoft, a leading software company, has has recently begun a major software development training center in Neusoft Park, Shenyang.The project is expected to complete construction in one year.

The software training base is planned to cover a total of 87,000 sq m of land, including a 22,000 sq m area for a teaching building. The investment will be around RMB180 million.

Once operational, the base has been designed to offer software-related training services to 10,000 students and trainees annually.

Shenyang’s Executive Vice-Mayor Zhao Changyi said it will help the city move closer toward its goal of building itself into a leading software center in the country.
Source: China.org.cn