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Thanks to Detroit, China Is Poised to Lead

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/business/yourmoney/12ford.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: March 12, 2006
CHONGQING, China

Soaring Sales, Hot Competition

VOLKSWAGEN and other carmakers used to prosper by sending outdated factory equipment to China to produce older models no longer salable in the West. But competition has become so fierce here that Honda is about to introduce its latest version of the Civic only several months after it went on sale in Europe, Japan and the United States. Toyota, meanwhile, is assembling its Prius gasoline-electric sedan only in Japan and China.

When Ford Motor opened its first production line here in western China just three years ago, it used a layout copied from a Ford factory in the Philippines to produce 20,000 sedans a year based on a small car design taken from Ford operations in India.

But this winter, Ford opened a second production line next door that is practically identical to one of its most advanced factories, the Saarlouis operation in southwestern Germany. The new line produces the Focus, the same small car it builds in Germany (but different from the Focus sold in the United States). And with continuing improvements to the first line, it will bring total capacity here to 200,000 cars a year by June.

The Chinese managers here are not even satisfied with that. “I want to learn from Germany and then improve on it,” said Li Jianping, the factory’s vice director of manufacturing.

Ford’s success in rapidly expanding the scale and sophistication of its Chongqing operations illustrates how quickly the overall auto industry is expanding and modernizing in China. One requirement for a country to become an automobile exporter is to develop a highly competitive domestic market that demands excellent quality and efficiency, and China has managed to create just such a market.

American and European carmakers, including Ford, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler and Volkswagen, as well as Toyota, Honda and Nissan of Japan are introducing their best technology to their plants in China, and not only to compete against one another. They also face rapidly growing competition in the Chinese market from purely local companies like Geely, Chery and Lifan.

These indigenous Chinese automakers captured 28.7 percent of the market in January, the first time in many years that Chinese brands have been pre-eminent — ahead of brands from Japan (27.8 percent), Europe (19 percent), the United States (14 percent) and South Korea (10.3 percent), according to Automotive Resources Asia, a consulting firm in Shanghai.

The multinationals “really have to bring their latest models,” said Yale Zhang, an analyst in the Shanghai office of CSM Worldwide, an auto consulting company based in the Detroit suburbs. “Even average consumers understand if this is not the latest model.”

Multinational joint ventures in China produced a total of 2.3 million family vehicles last year.

In the race to be No. 1 in China, the world’s fastest-growing car market, multinationals from the United States, Japan and Europe are falling over one another to share their latest designs, technology and manufacturing expertise with Chinese partners. But industry experts say that the sharing has helped China prepare to become a major car exporter within four years, increasing the pressure on G.M., Ford and other industry giants, which are already losing sales and market share to foreign rivals.

Few auto executives now doubt that the successful Chinese companies that emerge from the free-for-all in their home country will be ready to tackle world markets. “I’ve seen the Chinese vehicles in China from various, various brands, and I’ve said it’s a threat that will come to the U.S., I think, by the end of the decade,” said Thomas W. LaSorda, Chrysler’s chief executive.

All of the multinationals rapidly expanding in China say that their main goal lies in serving the Chinese market and not in exports. Still, Honda is already exporting small cars from China to Europe, while DaimlerChrysler is negotiating to build very small cars in China for sale in the United States, probably under the Dodge brand.

Until the last few years, China’s main advantages in the global auto manufacturing market were in its cheap labor and its talent for copying older Western designs, often while avoiding licensing fees, a practice that cut research and development costs to almost nothing.

Wages of less than $200 a month remain a big advantage for China, but it is developing another. Domestic and foreign automakers are starting with clean slates to build new operations, using efficient approaches and advanced management methods. It is similar to the way German and Japanese companies built new and more efficient factories starting in the 1980’s, mostly in the American South, helping them to leap beyond Detroit’s expertise.

G.M. and its local partner, the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, built an extensive vehicle design and engineering studio in Shanghai that has just finished a redesign of the Buick LaCrosse for the Chinese market.

Soaring Sales, Hot Competition In the central city of Wuhan, Honda has just finished quadrupling the capacity of its joint-venture factory with the Dongfeng Motor Group, to 120,000 cars a year. It is also starting to build the Civic there. The expansion, costing $350 million, took just a year, half as long as a comparable expansion in the United States.

Perhaps most tellingly, on Dec. 15 Toyota began assembling Prius hybrids in the northern city of Changchun. The world’s multinationals had long been leery of transferring proprietary technology to make hybrid gasoline-electric engines in China, for fear that it would be copied. While Toyota is still cautious, China is nonetheless the only place besides Japan where Toyota is assembling the Prius, arguably its most important car in a decade.

Furthermore, Volkswagen said in September that it would jointly develop a hybrid minivan for the Chinese market with Shanghai Automotive — a project that is likely to give the Chinese automaker a significant understanding of the technology.

THE risk for the multinationals is that their inventions may be turned against them. When G.M. followed Volkswagen into the Chinese market in the mid-1990’s, it was assigned the same partner: Shanghai Automotive, which announced plans on Feb. 23 to begin assembling and selling its own brand of cars in China while retaining the joint ventures. Other Chinese partners of multinationals are expected to follow suit in the next several years.

G.M., Ford, Volkswagen and other multinationals continue to work with Chinese partners because the government here requires them to do so. Foreign companies must assemble cars in 50-50 joint ventures with local partners. Honda alone has a 60 percent stake in a factory: a plant in Guangzhou that makes cars only for export.

Chinese automakers are also buying modern technology and design themselves. Chery has hired some of the best-known Italian auto design firms to spruce up its cars. When the MG Rover Group of Britain entered bankruptcy proceedings last year, the Nanjing Automobile Group outbid Shanghai Automotive to take control of Rover and its fairly modern engine-producing subsidiary, Powertrain Ltd., and move it to China.

The Lifan Group, a car and motorcycle maker with headquarters several miles from the Ford plant here, is bidding to buy one of the world’s most advanced engine factories, a joint venture of DaimlerChrysler and BMW in southern Brazil.

But running efficient factories can often be even more important than buying the latest, most expensive robots. The Hafei Group, an automaker in Harbin in northern China, discovered this when it installed expensive European and Japanese automated equipment four years ago, only to find that its disorderly factory layout was less efficient and less flexible than its aging factory next door, where workers used hammers and other hand tools in smoky air.

Inventory control is another matter. Many Chinese auto factories keep extensive, costly stockpiles of parts on hand, whereas new Western-designed factories, including the engine operation in southern Brazil, are designed to receive frequent but small shipments from suppliers. Chinese manufacturers are now learning from their Western partners how to operate with this just-in-time delivery of parts.

The best way to appreciate how car manufacturing in China has changed is to look at the Ford factory here, a 50-50 joint venture with the Chongqing Chang’an Automobile Company. The first production line was supposed to be simple, relying heavily on manual labor and producing a sturdy Fiesta sedan of older design. Teams of local managers and workers were sent to the Philippines and India to learn the craft.

But the second line now includes robots to weld the stiff bodies of the Focus sedans for a more precise ride. Another robot applies the adhesive that holds the windshield in place, as in Germany. One small difference is that a robot guides the windshield into place in Germany, while people do so here, said Mr. Li, whom Ford sent to Germany for four weeks to study the system there.

Wang Cheng-guo, a strapping 23-year-old with a two-year degree in computer hardware from a technical college, started working at the Ford factory in 2004. Each day, he had to strain to lift 50-pound seats by hand into sedans on the first production line here.

Mr. Wang said that with five eight-hour days a week and pay that has now reached nearly $200 a month, the job nonetheless looked good to him when compared with his father’s job at a nearby Chang’an car factory. His father, 48, has worked from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. at that factory, with few vacations, for almost 30 years. While his father still pushes racks of parts to the assembly line, the son earns more, even with a much shorter schedule.

“When I was young, I rarely saw him,” said Mr. Wang, who with his first Ford paycheck bought his mother a thick green winter coat and took his parents to a traditional spicy dinner of Chongqing hot pot.

Three months after Mr. Wang joined the factory, Ford improved the first production line by installing an electrical boom to help him swing the seats into the cars. When he concluded that the boom made a time-consuming pivot in the wrong direction and asked that it swing into the car from a different angle, local managers soon made the change — an adjustment that might have languished for months in more bureaucratic factories in other countries.

Mr. Wang, recently engaged, is now making all sorts of plans, the kind that millions of Chinese want to make as prices fall and technology improves. “I want to get married,” he said, “and get a car someday.”

(www.dacare-group.com)

China’s Workers See Thin Protection In Insurance Plans

http://www.amcham-shanghai.org/AmChamPortal/MCMS/Presentation/Resources/News/News.aspx?Guid={B63D581B-3024-4EEA-9D31-064C1284F996}

SHANGHAI — Hu Cunxi thought he understood the financial risks of “big sickness” — or “da bing” — the common Chinese term for cancer, stroke and other life-threatening diseases.

He had edited a popular Chinese manual on household finances that encourages readers to load up on medical insurance. He himself had bought a policy from a unit of New York-based insurer American International Group Inc. He saw it as prudent backup to the government-mandated coverage he received as an editor at the state-owned Shanghai Financial News.

Five years ago, Mr. Hu’s wife, Cao Meihua, a high-school teacher, was diagnosed with “big sickness.” Then Mr. Hu himself fell ill. Now both husband and wife, who are in their late 40s, are battling advanced cancer, and occupy adjacent wards of a Shanghai hospital.

China’s high-cost hospital system swiftly overwhelmed the insurance coverage they had through their state jobs. Mr. Hu’s AIG policy wasn’t designed to cover such medical calamities. Their treatments have consumed their life savings and his parents’ retirement nest egg. They are now broke.

“We used to be white-collar workers,” says Mr. Hu, who seethes with anger about the quality of his government insurance. “Now, we’re in poverty.”

More than two-thirds of China’s 1.3 billion people have no health insurance at all, and many cannot afford any medical care. But under China’s pay-as-you-go health-care system, even those with insurance are often forced to make agonizing decisions about whether they can afford treatment for serious illness. Problems with insurance coverage have become a crisis for China’s growing urban middle class, eating into support for the ruling Communist Party.

As recently as the late 1970s, the Chinese government controlled all hospitals, employed all doctors, and offered almost universal health-care coverage. In the cities, the state provided insurance to civil servants, factory workers and their families. Collective farms provided care in the countryside. But the entire system began breaking down in the early 1980s as market-style reforms led collective farms to disband and money-losing factories to close. Tens of millions of workers were left without jobs or insurance.

A decade ago, Beijing began looking for a new health-insurance model. In 1998, government authorities introduced a national program called Basic Medical Insurance. All employers are required to provide employees with some coverage for both routine medical problems and “big sickness.” To fund the plan, workers contribute 2% of their salaries, on average, and employers contribute an additional 7.5%. Family members, however, are not covered, and children must rely on limited insurance programs provided by schools. Authorities enforce the requirements for state companies, but large parts of the booming private sector ignore it.

The government plan has many gaps. At the end of 2003, it offered insurance protection to 109 million urban workers. That constitutes less than 20% of China’s approximately 600 million urban dwellers. Coverage in rural areas is even spottier. Studies show that three-quarters of private-sector employees remain uninsured.

The Basic Medical Insurance itself is limited. Typically, it covers 70% to 80% of hospital charges. Patients must pay the rest, in cash. Seriously ill patients who cannot raise sufficient money are forced to check out of hospitals, or to opt for less expensive courses of treatment. Basic drugs are covered, but expensive new medicines such as powerful anti-cancer drugs are not.

“It’s a real problem,” concedes Mao Qunan, spokesman for the Ministry of Health. “People should consider commercial insurance.”

Chen Ailian, a 65-year-old volunteer at the Shanghai Cancer Recovery Club, was diagnosed with breast cancer 17 years ago. “If I had got sick today, I would never have survived,” she says. She needed surgery, so her state-owned sewing-machine factory sent a note to the hospital promising payment. The operation cost $500, but she didn’t have to pay any of it.

Today, hospital emergency rooms demand cash up front, whether or not a patient has insurance. Insured patients pay for everything from gurneys to emergency surgery, then apply for reimbursement later. Those without cash are denied treatment.

A Wrenching Decision

In 2003, He Guofu turned up at a Shanghai emergency room six hours after suffering a stroke. The surgeon told Mr. He’s wife, Sun Yuanzhen, that her husband needed surgery to relieve pressure on his brain. He told her it would cost $7,000 to operate, paid in advance, but warned her there was only a 50-50 chance the procedure would help.

Mr. He, who worked at a state-owned construction company, and his wife, a retired statistician, were not poor. They both had insurance. But they didn’t have that kind of cash on hand, and Mr. He’s employer refused to advance it, even though insurance was likely to reimburse at least some of it.

Ms. Sun hesitated. It was a Friday night. She decided to think about it over the weekend. The 50-50 odds worried her. By Monday, she had decided to borrow the money, but the surgeon told her it was too late to operate.

Her indecision still tortures her. Her husband, who is 54, is now bedridden and requires spoon-feeding, and Ms. Sun struggles to pay her teenage son’s school fees. She regrets that she didn’t scramble to raise the money and gamble on the surgery. “Everything was a blur,” she says. “I was so confused.”

Health-care costs in China are rising rapidly, turning hospitals into symbols of unfettered capitalism. Chinese and international health experts blame runaway costs in part on an effort to make treatment more affordable for the poor. Authorities capped prices for basic drugs and procedures at below-market rates. But they let hospitals compensate by profiting on almost everything else, from advanced drugs to sophisticated diagnostic tests.

That decision created an incentive to provide high-end treatment that has transformed Chinese hospitals, making world-class care available to those who can afford it. Even small-city hospitals, once technological backwaters, boast CT scanners. In each of the past five years, Shanghai hospitals have spent nearly $100 million on sophisticated medical equipment, says Hu Shanlian, a professor of health management at the city’s Fudan University and an adviser to the Chinese government. Drug sales account for 45% of the revenues of Shanghai hospitals, he says. “The health system is really in a crisis,” he says.

Doctors, many of them employees of state-owned hospitals, also have an incentive to steer patients toward high-cost treatments and drugs. The average monthly pay for Shanghai doctors is less than $400, not much more than a taxi driver working overtime can make. But they can double their incomes through bonuses earned by prescribing tests and by dispensing drugs with high profit margins. Few medical systems in the world link doctors’ pay so directly to revenue from patients, health-care economists say.

Mr. Mao, the Ministry of Health spokesman, contends that market forces have gone too far. “If you only trust the market, you will have a disaster,” he argues. The government needs to play a leading role, he says.

The practices of hospitals and doctors are only lightly regulated by Beijing, and there is little self-regulation. China lacks the kind of medical professional associations that set ethical standards, hear complaints and punish wrongdoers in the U.S. and other countries.

When Chinese authorities decided on the national insurance plan, they failed to recognize an inherent design flaw: The system reimburses hospitals for at least a portion of whatever care they choose to deliver. In effect, government economists acknowledge, the state has become a blank check for doctors. The system encourages doctors to overprescribe expensive drugs and tests, economists say, then to charge patients for whatever their insurance does not cover.

In the U.S., health insurers guard against that outcome through “utilization review,” a process under which they evaluate the medical necessity of hospital treatment. Tests and procedures deemed unnecessary are not reimbursed. Although the effectiveness of such reviews varies, the process discourages blatantly unnecessary treatments. In China, there are typically no such review procedures.

Most health-insurance plans in the U.S. also set out-of-pocket maximums for patients facing medical catastrophes. In addition to protecting seriously ill patients from financial ruin, the caps provide another incentive for hospitals to control costs: Large bills have to be justified to the insurance companies responsible for paying them.

A World Bank study of China by economists Adam Wagstaff and Magnus Lindelow concluded that patients with insurance are sometimes persuaded to undergo far more expensive treatments than the uninsured. Chinese doctors have “strong incentive to favor high-tech care over basic care,” which may be more costly and sophisticated than necessary, the report said. Insurance may “actually increase the probability of large out-of-pocket payments,” the report concluded. There is no formal complaint procedure for patients, the economists added.

The Ministry of Health’s Mr. Mao says the government has spent two years negotiating with hospitals over how to make drug prices and profit incentive systems more reasonable. “It’s a very complicated issue,” he says. “It takes time. We don’t want to get it wrong and then have to start all over again.”

The Chinese government’s share of total health spending has plummeted. Between 1978 and 2003, private outlays as a percentage of total health-care spending rose from to 60% from 20%, government figures show. The shift comes as chronic diseases such as cancer, which are costly to treat, replace contagious ones like tuberculosis as the biggest burden on the medical system.

Chinese government officials have acknowledged that health care has become such a financial burden to people, even to those with insurance, that it threatens social stability. President Hu Jintao has pledged to increase government health spending.

The government is trying to expand state insurance coverage to more people in cities and the countryside. In cities, officials are trying to set up a network of government-funded community health centers as a first stop for patients. They would provide basic care and advise patients about treatment options, drugs and hospitalization.

Adding Coverage

Before “big sickness” struck in 2000, Mr. Hu, the editor, and Ms. Cao, his wife, were making nearly $5,000 a year. In China, that put them at the bottom edge of the middle class. They had married late and were childless, which gave them some financial freedom. They bought a two-bedroom apartment with a $25,000 mortgage from China Construction Bank.

They both had insurance through their state employers. Like growing numbers of upwardly mobile professionals, they decided to supplement it for extra peace of mind. Believing that his government insurance would cover any “big sickness,” Mr. Hu turned to American International Assurance Co., a unit of AIG, for personal accident insurance.

Like other Western insurers, AIG is betting demand will grow for private health insurance to cover gaps in government coverage. Mr. Hu’s insurance agent at AIG, Wu Caihong, does a brisk business selling “big sickness” policies that offer lump-sum cash payments to policyholders who fall ill. She says she tells her customers that extra medical insurance “isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have.”

Ms. Wu says that after selling Mr. Hu the accident policy, she tried repeatedly to persuade him to buy “big sickness” coverage. But by then, Mr. Hu’s wife had contracted breast cancer, and Mr. Hu had no spare money for premiums on a new policy.

Ms. Cao, who had retired from her teaching job, still had government insurance coverage, but it did not cover the expensive form of chemotherapy she needed. Mr. Hu went into overdrive to make ends meet. He set out to earn extra cash at night by editing books he hoped would sell to China’s hobbyists. He dashed off 11 books in four years, including a history of Chinese teapots and a collector’s guide to subway tickets. But sales were disappointing, and the extra work has earned him to date only $1,500.

Last year, doctors informed Mr. Hu that he had stomach cancer. He also learned that his government insurance would not cover the kind of chemotherapy he needed. To save money during his first year of treatment, he relied on a mixture of medicines covered by his insurance. This year, after the cancer spread to his liver, he switched to a more powerful drug regimen recommended by his doctor. The new drugs were much more expensive — and he had to buy them himself.

The more aggressively they battled their cancers, the deeper he and his wife pushed themselves into debt. They borrowed money from friends and relatives. Mr. Hu tried to sell their apartment, but he found that superstitious Shanghai buyers shun houses where “big sickness” has struck. He says even old friends, worried that being around him would bring bad luck, stopped dropping by.

So far, they have spent about $25,000 for her treatment and $12,000 for his. “When you get this disease, there’s no bottom line,” says Mr. Hu, a scholarly man who now has dark rims beneath his eyes. A Communist Party member, he is furious that so few drugs are covered by his government insurance.

In desperation over their illnesses, Mr. Hu and his wife have turned to religion. He became a devout Christian after a group of elderly women from a local church stopped by his hospital bed to pray. A black Bible sits by his pillow in the hospital ward. These days, he relies on donations from members of his congregation to help foot his hospital bills.

Ms. Cao’s breast cancer has spread to her lungs, leaving her close to death. “We’re both intellectuals. We’re supposed to know about insurance,” she says. “But we realize now that insurance just doesn’t work. If you want to stay alive, you have to pay yourself.”

(www.dacare.com)

Shortage of Managers In China Sends Recruiters To India And Philippines

http://www.amcham-shanghai.org/AmChamPortal/MCMS/Presentation/Resources/News/News.aspx?Guid={42A31EE1-8559-48A3-8B39-7364BB94B6FF}

SHANGHAI — Tired of the revolving door of Chinese managers and the rise in salary with each new hire, Paul Stepanek decided it was time to find cheaper talent elsewhere. So he went to India.

For roughly the same salary his previous Chinese quality-assurance manager received, Mr. Stepanek recruited 32-year-old Indian engineer Sandeep Sharma, who speaks English and has about a decade of experience.

“We’ve had a new manager every year for the past seven years. When you lose a manager…you lose all the history that you’ve had and all the training that’s gone into it,” Mr. Stepanek says. His company, USActive, helps U.S. firms buy metal and plastic machine parts in China and helps manage their factories, including that of Milwaukee-based manufacturer Jason Inc., where Mr. Sharma works.

As foreign companies like Jason set up Chinese factories in droves, there is an increasing shortage of competent managers capable of dealing with foreign clients. With English-language skills more important than a mastery of Chinese for these positions, companies are recruiting from India and the Philippines — a trend that is expected to get bigger before enough local Chinese are trained by multinational companies in English and other skills to begin filling the gap.

“Anybody in Shanghai can go out and look for a job tomorrow and get a job that’s going to pay 20% to 100% more than their current salary, because there are so many companies that are coming into China every week, every month,” says Mr. Stepanek, an American who speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese and has lived and worked in Taiwan and China for 18 years.

During the next decade or 15 years, China will need 75,000 executive-level managers who can work both in China and in a global setting — compared with an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 now, predicts Andrew Grant, who last year published a report, “China’s Looming Talent Shortage.” Mr. Grant leads the Greater China practice of global consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

“A lot of people had the somewhat superficial assumption that China’s a very large place with lots and lots of people. Therefore the notion that there is a talent shortage in any way, must just be a misnomer,” Mr. Grant says. “But now they are taking the challenge seriously.”

For Mr. Sharma, who hails from the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, China’s booming growth has been a door to the world. His departure for Shanghai in November was his first trip out of India and his first time on a plane.

“I [didn’t] want to be a frog in a well. I wanted to dive into the sea,” says Mr. Sharma, who calls Shanghai “a city of dreams.” He hopes his work there will eventually lead him to the U.S. or other locations where Jason has operations.

Mr. Sharma doesn’t speak Chinese, but is taking lessons. Some of the Chinese staff who speak a bit of English help him, or he manages with body language. The inability to speak Chinese wasn’t an issue in hiring Mr. Sharma, Mr. Stepanek says, as most of Jason’s client base is in the U.S.

Technology-related companies and those in the service industry that deal with the West are also bringing in employees from India and the Philippines.

Filipino managers and staff are visible in some Shanghai clinics and high-end restaurants. Most don’t speak Chinese.

Jesus Yabes, the Philippine consul general in Shanghai since 2002, says he has seen a noticeable rise in Filipino professionals coming to China for work. An increasing number, especially those with some ethnic Chinese background, are learning to speak Chinese, he adds.

But Mr. Yabes doesn’t expect demand for Filipino employees to stay strong in the long term, as more Chinese people learn English and receive training or a Western education. Mr. Yabes also hopes for an improvement in the Philippine economy that could support the return of professional managers back home.

Sareet Majumdar, President of IC Intracom Asia, a trade-consulting firm, has a Filipino manager who oversees export projects in southern China. “Eventually, I hope to replace all my foreign managers with local Chinese talent,” he says.

It might happen sooner than he expects.

McKinsey’s Mr. Grant says he has seen a strong push in the past year by Chinese state-owned companies to hire consulting firms or work with multinational firms to start training employees. Multinationals are hiring smart local Chinese who don’t have fluent English skills, and training them, he says.

“That should help close the gap in the short-term,” he says. But for China to cope with the demand for managers that can work in an international environment in the long term, Mr. Grant says, a fundamental change is needed in the education system to raise the quality of university graduates.

In the meantime, smaller companies with tight costs may have to find creative solutions. Mr. Stepanek is on his next recruiting search — this time to the Czech Republic and Slovenia.

(www.dacare-group.com)