Chinese goods move up global value chain, earn respect of world's consumers

BEIJING - With the unremitting efforts of Chinese industries to move up the global value chain, more consumers around the world are recognizing the higher quality and cutting-edge technology of products labeled 'Made-in-China.'

China introduced its national Made in China 2025 blueprint in May 2015, which listed several goals for the manufacturing industry, including boosting innovation, fostering Chinese brands and promoting service-oriented manufacturing.

Thanks to the country's innovation drive, high-tech products made in China and indigenous Chinese brands have increasingly in recent years entered daily lives of worldwide consumers and taken a growing share of the international market.

More and more users and observers have come to agree that Made-in-China is now more about high technology and quality and less about large quantity at low prices.

In many countries, including the Czech Republic, Made-in-China once meant cheap commodities. Nowadays, this impression has begun to change.

With China-Czech trade on the rise, more Chinese high-tech products are entering the Czech market, noted Cheng Yongru, commercial counselor of the Chinese embassy in the central European country.

Those Chinese products which were once peddled with low prices now have been replaced by quality ones, Cheng added.

In the Czech Republic - as well as across Europe - Chinese telecommunications, electronic and mechanical equipment companies are gaining a larger market share.

For example, the market share of Chinese tech giant Huawei in the Czech smartphone market has exceeded 24 percent, ranking third after Apple and Samsung.

As a matter of fact, Huawei already became the world's third-largest smartphone brand in 2015, with a shipment of 108 million devices.

Huawei's fast growth stems from its long-term investments in research and development.

The company invested $38 billion in R&D in the last 10 years, Richard Yu, head of Huawei's Consumer Business Group, told Xinhua during the Consumer Electronics Show held last month in the US city of Las Vegas.

In 2015 alone, Huawei spent $9.2 billion on R&D, making it a larger investor in that area than Apple and Cisco and the ninth largest among all its peers across the world, added Yu.

As of June 2015, Huawei had submitted more than 76,000 patent applications in China, the United States and Europe.

According to a report published by the World Intellectual Property Organization last November, China surpassed the US, Japan and South Korea to rank top in the world for patent applications, receiving over 1 million applications in 2015.

Last August, China also joined the ranks of the world's top 25 innovative economies in the Global Innovation Index released by Cornell University, the international graduate university INSEAD, and the WIPO.

"This is in keeping with all the developments that we have seen in China in recent years, including the use of innovation as a major component in the transition of the Chinese economy from 'made in China' to 'created in China,'" said WIPO Director General Francis Gurry.

In Fiji, an island country in the South Pacific Ocean, low-end products from China such as textiles and petty commodities for daily use still take up a significant market share. However, products such as buses, personal computers and mobile phones are quickly making their presence felt.

On the streets of the Fijian capital of Suva, as well as on Queens Road connecting Suva with the tourism hub of Nadi, old buses are typically out-of-date Japanese ones manufactured more than a decade ago, while new buses tend to be Chinese brands, such as King Long and Yutong.

Xinhua

(China Daily 03/13/2017 page16)