It wasn’t difficult to guess who dominates this rank. But I want to use rank to arrow your attention to different area. So similar and so different at the same time. New world brand, most powerful then all of those presented all together. It is one brand manufacturing billions of different products. In fact it is brand so powerful that it can regulate its own currency ratings and be a thread to all economic giants like US or EU.
It is brand called “made in china”, and it is definite winner of 2011 big brand rank.
What inspired me to write this article was TV show on BBC2 called “The Chinese Are Coming” shown on 15 of Feb 2011 at 9pm, presented by Justin Rowlatt.
Available on
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ykxfh
And YouTube below (below is part 1 of 4, watch part 2 3 4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZQpl3SzvjA
Reviewed on
It mechanism of global economy which effects we all do NOT realize.
Let me start from one of the Brazilian iron mine operators. Company behind is selling iron mainly to chine worth 36mld USD a day making total PROFIT of 6bln USD a year. It is not how much company is worth, as in the rank presented above, it is pure profit they are making each year since they’ve joined partnership with china. You might say fair enough, business is business. But as Justing goes deeper and deeper he discovers that to produce pure iron from the raw material it needs to be melted and manufactured. There another crowd taking care of it. But they are using charcoal in this process. As there is limited source of it, they got local poor people to cut down the Amazon rain forest to manufacture charcoal illegally.
Then Chinese ships are collecting ready-to-go iron, bringing it to Chinese factories, making products or parts and bringing back to US and EU.
Also from the show we can find out theories that china is keeping their currency low compared to USD so they can buy cheap and sell.
As it was presented one of the US manufactures proved that china is selling same product below the manufacturing costs. Obviously as main capitalism rule says, cheaper is better, US one went out of the business. Plenty of people lost their jobs, town became industrial ghosted town, what we would describe tragedy few years back, but today we would refer to as reality.
Now US government stepped in and put tax on that product imported from china, so US manufacturer could jump into the business, people got jobs again.
Spokesperson for chine said that their intentions are not to conquer the US or any other part of the world. It is simple business. Seems like not only x-economic giants know how to manipulate capitalism.
So on the end, is it really right to say, nothing personal, business is business. Where people losing their jobs, homes and struggling to put food on their table?
But is it always up to government to act? What if it will end up with economic conflict between china and US/EU? That could easily lead to military conflict, and no one wants that. It is not poor Chinese people guilty, either are we, are we? Everyone wants to just make a living, make some money right?
So either start learning Chinese, and be prepared that you will work 14h a day. Not in the office, but hard physical factory labor for minimum wage. Without any quality medical help, and where you are told what you can and cannot. Where human rights are, well different. Or check label and pay more for product which is produced locally.
It turns out that cost of buying cheaper products is your job.