IBM is Latest US Tech Giant To Pull Back From China (axios.com) 28
IBM is the latest American company to downsize its presence in China amid heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing. From a report: China's efforts to decrease its dependence on the West have ratcheted up local market competition -- and U.S. tech giants including Microsoft are looking elsewhere to house their operations. IBM will shut down its research and development department in China, impacting about 1,000 jobs, multiple outlets reported Monday.
The Chinese government has encouraged domestic companies to overtake and push out U.S. tech dominance out of the country in a bid for self-sufficiency in the sector, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year. IBM has faced mounting competition in China in recent years, IBM executive Jack Hergenrother told employees virtually Monday, per the Journal. IBM reportedly plans to move its R&D operations to other overseas facilities. According to the company's 2023 annual report released earlier this year, the company saw its revenue in China drop 19.6% last year.
The Chinese government has encouraged domestic companies to overtake and push out U.S. tech dominance out of the country in a bid for self-sufficiency in the sector, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year. IBM has faced mounting competition in China in recent years, IBM executive Jack Hergenrother told employees virtually Monday, per the Journal. IBM reportedly plans to move its R&D operations to other overseas facilities. According to the company's 2023 annual report released earlier this year, the company saw its revenue in China drop 19.6% last year.
China is unsafe for business (Score:5, Interesting)
Anything developed, designed or built in China is invariably stolen.
Re:China is unsafe for business (Score:5, Informative)
China isn't even safe for Chinese businesses.
Many have moved their executive offices and R&D elsewhere, often to Singapore.
Tech companies in China are now required to have CCP members on the board to monitor their decisions for political deviance.
Jack Ma and others have been detained and intimidated. Jack is now living in Japan.
Tech innovation isn't compatible with correct Xi-Thought.
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Agreed.
The article says "the company saw its revenue in China drop 19.6% last year."
I submit that's because the government has stolen all it wants from these guys.
Quantity over Quality (Score:4, Informative)
China graduates almost 10x the number of engineers that the U.S. produces each year. Some of them are good, but by and large most of them can do little more than get grades in school. Their best engineers seem to come from U.S. schools. Their tech base still heavily relies on stealing stuff from more advanced nations.
I can't blame them for not wanting to be under the thumb of foreign corporations, but chasing them out of the country isn't going to work.
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Outsourcing makes a lot of sense in most cases. Making money is the direct objective of a business venture. Making good quality products and making customers happy is only one means to that end.
I think China is very close to reaching a tipping point where they do not have to rely as much on imported technological expertise. And in some sectors that is already the case. We basically ignored the problem for 40 years while they built up their industrial base because there was a lot of short-term profit to be h
Re:Quantity over Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Outsourcing makes a lot of sense in most cases. Making money is the direct objective of a business venture. Making good quality products and making customers happy is only one means to that end.
Ask Boeing how that's working out for them.
Re: Quantity over Quality (Score:3)
Boeing is a complex tapestry of management failures.
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Boeing’s management lost their focus on quality.
For Boeing-Boeing, it sucks. (Score:3)
I remember when IBM mattered... (Score:2)
I like your comment and there is some evidence that you are onto something. You already have a censor mod point from some troll. "Mod parent up"?
The main projections of your comment seem both sad and too plausible to me. But you also reminded me of the glory days of HP when the company was still able to pretend the money wasn't driving every decision. I can't remember the exact wording, but the HPers were supposed to focus on producing good products and services and let the profits come naturally. Unfortuna
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There's "outsourcing" and "offshoring", with some overlap but technically distinct.
Outsourcing can make sense if something is very much not a unique core competency of your company. For example, if you don't care about the OS embedded in your project, but you must embed an OS, it totally makes sense to outsource the OS, since it's the same sort of OS the entire industry uses and you have no unique intentions. Car companies back in the day used to manufacture their own metal, now they outsource it. Howeve
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I don't think it is a coincidence that China has ramped up the size of their navy since 2010. The do have the capability today to do blockades within the South China Sea. And I believe strongly that China will eventually be capable of landing a successful invasion force.
The capability will probably be there long before the will to take the risk is there.
It seems to be working for them so far. (Score:1)
Just to say - it may be hard to smuggle hardware and equipment from the USA to China, but moving knowledge is easy - legal or not. China sending their best and brightest to learn about virtually anything in the USA is far more productive than circumventing export regulations to steal physical objects. Customs may find that cell processor in my bag, but they can't find the knowledge in my head. This is a fact not lost on China.
Deniers to the contrary, China is acting quite brilliantly. Western nations r
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Some of them are good, but by and large most of them can do little more than get grades in school.
For years, they have had more engineers in training than the total number of engineers in the US. And quantity has a quality of its own. More crucially, engineering is seen in China as one of the elite activities, with fierce competition to get into the top universities. And the competition starts in the middle school, students learn hard to prepare for the gaokao (the entrance exam). And it's a seriously hard exam.
As a result, a good Chinese student can sleep through the US SAT and ACT exams and get top
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Sorry, but I don't want to hire people who have spent every waking moment either memorizing or regurgitating. I want to hire people who can think.
Yes, the top universities in China and India are excellent and extremely hard to get into, and top graduates from those schools are excellent engineers, not just walking databases, but they also get hired away very quickly. There was a time when India was the world's talent bargain, but it wasn't long before, just like band names, all the best ones were taken. In
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I want to hire people who can think.
This is pure bullshit. You can't "learn to think" without doing a lot of practice, and, yes, memorization.
Yes, the top universities in China and India are excellent and extremely hard to get into, and top graduates from those schools are excellent engineers, not just walking databases, but they also get hired away very quickly.
We used to call the walking databases "experts". You can't become one without having enough knowledge of the field.
And it shows. Because it's the _American_ tests that look like they are designed for barely trained monkeys, not the Chinese ones. SAT and even ACT are designed to test the rote memorization skills. For example, ACT math is 60 questions math for 60 minutes. For each question, all you need
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Practice and memorization are necessary, but not sufficient, for the kind of critical thinking good engineers need to be able to do.
Memorizing Webster's Third New International Unabridged Dictionary won't teach you how to speak or understand English.
It's the difference between a test question that asks you to draw the flow diagram for a TCP three-way handshake, versus a test question that says, "If you see this packet from A to B, describe the contents of the packet that A must have just have received from
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Practice and memorization are necessary, but not sufficient, for the kind of critical thinking good engineers need to be able to do.
What is "critical thinking"? And why Chinese schools don't promote it? Do you think that American schools somehow have a magical "critical thinking" class that you can take and become an engineer overnight?
It's also being able to make the connection in your head that the way to solve your immediate problem is the same as how you solved some other problem, even though they appear to be completely unrelated. Rote memorization just isn't enough.
You can't become an expert without doing thousands of hours of repetitive practice. And that's exactly what is NOT happening in the US schools, because there's this assumption that you can just "learn to think" and "learn while playing" and you don't need to put any effort into studying. High school espec
Here's how my former employer handled China (Score:5, Interesting)
So this company, who I will call Acme-X, used to make us all do mandatory internal training every year. You had a list of online training you had to complete and a deadline to finish them in with the threat of termination hanging over your head if you missed the deadline. Every year we got bribery training. They really drilled it into us that not only could you as an Acme-X employee never, ever bribe someone to get business, you couldn't even give jobs to friends of foreign government officials to get business. So about 13 years ago, I had a girlfriend who was from China and she said to me "Did you know your company has an office in Shanghai?" I had no idea about that. So I looked it up on an internal website and sure enough, we did. It seems that maybe in the late 2000s, Acme-X bought out some Chinese company based in Shanghai to get a foothold in the Chinese market. It never really worked out. The impression I got was that doing business in China was so dishonest that there was no real way Acme-X could grow the business they bought or get new business going through them without paying bribes, and the training we employees got encouraged us to rat out people who were paying bribes, so they simply firewalled this Shanghai based business from the entire rest of the company. The Shanghai employees got no access to US based systems. We didn't use their employees for anything. And when we had company wide meetings via Zoom like technology, they never participated and weren't even invited to attend. My former employer still owns this office in Shanghai, but I have no idea why. I guess they can't give up the hope that maybe one day things will change in China and they can do legit business there.
Where do they make Stinkpads? (Score:3)