Western firms are coining it along China’s One Belt, One Road

General Electric got $2.3bn in orders from the infrastructure project last year

 Print edition | Business

Aug 3rd 2017

“MUTUAL benefit, joint responsibility and shared destiny,” sings a choir of enthusiastic schoolgirls in a music video called “The Belt and Road, Sing Along” from Xinhua, a news service run by the Chinese government, that mixes shots of cranes and shipping containers with people enjoying foreign landmarks. Western firms are scarcely less optimistic. Launched by China in 2013, the One Belt, One Road policy, known as OBOR, has two parts. There is a land-based “belt” from China to Europe, evoking old Silk Road trade paths, then a “road” referring to ancient maritime routes.
OBOR will span 65 countries (see map), and China has so far invested over $900bn in projects ranging from highways in Pakistan to railway lines in Thailand. Western multinationals, spotting a bonanza, are selling billions of dollars of equipment, technology and services to Chinese firms building along it.

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America’s General Electric (GE) made sales of $2.3bn in equipment orders from OBOR projects in 2016, almost three times the total for the previous year. John Rice, the firm’s vice-chair, expects the firm to enjoy double-digit growth in revenues along OBOR in coming years. Other firms, such as Caterpillar, Honeywell, and ABB, global engineering giants, DHL, a logistics company, Linde and BASF, two industrial gas and chemicals manufacturers, and Maersk Group, a shipping firm, rattle off lists of OBOR projects. Deutsche Bank has structured eight trade deals around it and has an agreement with the China Development Bank, one of China’s policy lenders, to fund several OBOR schemes.
All the activity has confounded early sceptics. They noted that in the past 15 years as China industrialised, the country’s companies ran construction projects over an expanse approximately equivalent to the built area of all western Europe with very little help from foreign firms.
Yet OBOR has highlighted that Chinese groups have little experience abroad, and that their Western counterparts offer a technological edge and thorough knowledge of local conditions across the OBOR region, from Tajikistan to Thailand. Partnering with Western multinationals also gives Chinese companies credibility, particularly with financial institutions. One Western executive admits that Chinese companies make liberal use of his firm’s name in OBOR project presentations to raise finance even though it is only marginally involved.

Below the belt

Some executives worry that OBOR may have its downsides in the longer term. China wants to open up new markets for Chinese firms in sectors that are currently dominated by Western companies, across industries ranging from engineering and telecoms to shipping and e-commerce. Western firms are profiting handsomely from OBOR itself, but Chinese ones even more so. A database of open-source information collated by the Reconnecting Asia Project, run by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC, shows that 86% of OBOR projects have Chinese contractors, 27% have local ones and only 18% have contractors of foreign origin.
Chinese firms are moving beyond contract work to become operators of projects and investors too. Their Western competitors may win lots of business in the OBOR countries only for as long as their technological advantage lasts. That lead in turn will be eroded as Western companies work with Chinese partners on OBOR. In 2016 alone, ABB did business with more than 400 Chinese enterprises, helping them adjust for huge differences in construction and engineering standards across countries. Such firms will learn and advance in the process.
Yet for now, Western companies are focused on the opportunities. Jean-Pascal Tricoire, the Hong Kong-based chief executive of Schneider Electric, a French energy-services firm, says that for his company OBOR is one of the most important plans of the early part of this century. Honeywell has recently formed a team called “East to Rest” that manages sales and marketing to mainland firms that are expanding abroad. As a goateed singer in Xinhua’s music video promises Chinese viewers, “when Belt and Road reaches Europe, Europe’s red wine is delivered to the doorstep half a month earlier”. For years to come, OBOR looks likely to be the toast of Western boardrooms, too.

media debate

Dear Miles and Friends- Miles are you in new york middle of next week or back in columbia where my frend camilo from wall streets Imperative Fund – Lifting communities out of poverty, in 5 years or less  will be?

Imperative Fund – Lifting communities out of poverty, in 5 years or less

MILES SPORTS Public-Youth-Private Parterning  CAN SUSTAIN 17 GOALS COLLABORATION CULTURES

Playworks I love your case out of colombia on how sports can change communities and youths world. How can we scale awareness around its possibilities and can we edit a catalogue of win-win solutions of sports, fashion, and arts-culture entrepreneurs

Playworks Main content for site home page and community home pages.

Probably pivotal in the sports world is the DC-based ceo of the special olympics whose other lifelong passion is emotional learning nicely echoing your case. African American Friends Baltimore are looking at how to scale his knowhow and that of Leana Wen (america's extraordinary public health servant with special interest in adolescence) featured with George Patton in Mattias Youth in Development WB event. Ironically the communities where Freddie Gray was killed were 1881 also the first black girls end slavery communities nurturing Thurgood Marshall as their best known alumn. So they need safe spaces to play sports (and school) just like you described Miles in Colombia. 

Arguably number 1 in organically changing youth's world of musicians is monica yunus's www.singforhope.org though for sake of transparency I declare certain biases in wanting it to be. Out of the Vatican University that Maurice is Youth Abmasador for http://premiosciacca.it/ is a jolly happy model too 

Of course many people valuing sustainable youths futures are chasing Jack Ma for sponsorship or being recognised as synergetic to his purpose or indeed all of Xi Jinpings China's rejuvenation purpose with half a billion under 30s who need to be sustainable employed.

Davos 2017 - An Insight, An Idea with Jack Ma 

Urgent though: in Davos this year Ma declared his Big Data Small wizard way of changing sports market so everyone could play is sponsoring the next 3 olympics Tokyo, Paris, LA - hence the need to build partnerships with local hosts- miko is working hard on the tokyo side, the idea of a free sustainability mba actually statred in paris in 2005 (I know who)

Davos 2017 - An Insight, An Idea with Jack Ma http://www.weforum.org/ A conversation with Alibaba founder Jack Ma on the future of online trade and globalizat...

In any event Ma needs a catalogue of what turns sports, fashions and arts bottom up. Moreover Argentina is his biggest latin american partner on the ecommerce and social credit side alipay so one can expect his to play some role in argentina g20 july 2017 just as he did hangzhou g20 china 2015. Knowing Jack Ma partnership ecosystem is also essential to timely leapfroging your localities greatest chnace to co-create jobs-rich techology preferentially applied to include poorest girls and boys 

Very exciting at Beijing May's Belt Road Forum was UN Antonio Guterres

declaration that this actions global2.0 beyond the chat we often do in NY. Belt and Road: Exclusive interview with UN Secretary General Guterres

Belt and Road: Exclusive interview with UN Secretary General Guterres UN Chief Antonio Guterres is also in Beijing for the Belt and Road Forum. CGTN anchor Tian Wei sat down with Gut...

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Further BACK FROM FUTURE GOALS Mapping

 CULTURAL PERMISSIONS OF BOTTOM-UP All the deepest pre-digital solutions (from Bangladesh's girl empowerment around sir fazle abed to farmer/kims partners in health) to ending poverty emerged from latin countries in the 1960s including Luis Peru and Colombia and Paulo Freier's Brazil. So Argentina convening Franciscan value g20 July 2018 (this student class yeras main incubation purpose)  is timely as indeed the next year is luis 2019 youth and americas leadership event in Peru.

Back in 1972 my father at The Economist created the future history genre of entrepreneurial revolution - would the net generation be sustainability's and livelihoods best of times, or would orwell's big brotherdom be how the global village world spiralled off course? People like gifford pinchot of the intrapreur movement out of tarrytown quickly joined in the genre as it evolved in the 1970s. So fathers last project assmbled Adam Smith scholars around Muhammad Yunus to launch Journal of Social Business - sustainability as system design; economics as job creation networking  out of Glasgow Univerity 2008 (250th celebration of publication of moral sentiments) to2012 with Gordon Brown chief local fan of these 4 years of youth empowerment.

Journal of Social Business - sustainability as system design; economics as ...

Fast forward 2030now 2020now: My family and friends goal is to bring out either a book or a mooc on solution franchsies of world record job creators and initially to see it published in chiense and english though latin languages and japanese and korean are essential too. It may sound crazy but i am confidnent that by 2020 China's top public servant university Tsinghua and MIT will have  mooced a sustainability MBA where the theory and certification is free for those students who spend 4 years applying it. A nice reversal of the MBA being both the most expensive and most sustainability destructive curriculum - it was after all designed from the outset round big banking

 Alibaba Group Founder and Commissioner, Jack Ma, Shares His Thoughts on the #LearningGeneration

Alibaba Group Founder and Commissioner, Jack Ma, Shares His Thoughts on the... Jack Ma, Founder of Alibaba Group and an Education Commission Commissioner, shares his thoughts on why L-Q is mo...

Alibaba Group on Twitter “"He understands a profound truth that will contribute a tremendous amount to the United Nations." Wor...

If anyone I know gets close enough to Jack Ma to explain their movement it would be important to me that all the people circulated here were included as much as they wanted to be. Four years ago Alizee/amy was watching the ony 10 minute segment jim kim has ever mooced while finishing her degree back in china; basically maurice at vatican university and she have been seraching global youth-led movements ever since - miko is her japanese american friend and miko's husband invented extextiles which can change fashion branding; camilo arranges wall street funds to end poverty 5000 people at a time in latin america and both he and amy are working out of columbia university wuth class of 2017-2018.

SINO_US FRIENDSHIP CIRCUMNAVIGATING TRUMPDOM

Over decades  extremely practical relationships have been planted between henry kissinger , the c100 chinese american network he helped start 30 years ago around musicians and architects and brookings in both DC and Tsinghua, and the people i have got to know after 6 visits to beijing. I am happy to map connections such as brookings with anyone who wants to including the people at IYLA I met yesterday. 

The five youth-edited associations of loosely partnering entrepreneurs we are trying to form with the hope that one gets close enough to jack ma to explain the other 4 in addition to sports are:

big data small tech wizards

green big bang

education starting with the very simple culture-interfacing idea of making second langiages 10 tiems more affordable for systainability goals youth to converse in- everywhere that china extends belt road project the soft power secret at any boder place is to set up dual language schools

and those who value everything that sir fazle abed did most to sustain in empowering girls to build bangladesh     

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Sorry that was long. If people dont like the whole idea but see things to leap forward with in eg womens empowerment subgroups please do but making sure amy can help with any chinese translation is simplest way to ensure scaling with all the chinese friends networks she has been taught to open space by her mentor harrison own Welcome to Open Space and  scale collaboiratively and through the joy and hope of youth which right now in mr trumps america (and arguably the sceond worst media in the world after north koreas media) needs quite a lot of undercover work to safely but urgently re-open society for worldwide youth 

Welcome to Open Space and Training and resources for High Performing Systems, Peacemaking, Open Space Technology in organizations from Har...

I also have a question for Diva- She was india and the world's youngest participant at mattias' youth in development and in the last class to get president kalams youth award before his untimely death for exploring how etextiles on animals could monitor theiur wellbeing. Diva did you get to Harvard starting this month? I know a few people in Boston and 2 timelines are extremely urgent to all my chiense friends

India G20 2019

Mumbai 2018 AIIB and Green Big Bang Club update (2000 governors becnamrking how to race to thriving carbon zero economies - korea's signature gift to millennials world)

I belive the youth paricipant from the phillipines has a pivotal piece friends in beijing need so i will be writing something similar to her - say if anyone wants to join in

Thank you for all doing brilliant work in valuing youth openly

Chris Macrae bethesda 240 316 8157 

help map 21st "friends" guide to #learninggeneration 

help map 21st "friends" guide to #learninggeneration

https://committee100.org/blog/2016/12/15/event-u-s-china-panel-featuring-honorable-henry-kissinger-new-york-december-14-2016/