Posted on 12/17/2014 5:23:52 AM PST by thackney
When a unit of North Carolinas Curtiss-Wright Corp. won a roughly $300 million deal in 2007 to supply components for new reactors in China, industry officials trumpeted Chinas nuclear boom as good for U.S. business.
Today, Chinese companies are competing for that businessand foreign companies risk getting left out. Meanwhile, Curtiss-Wrights contract is caught up in a legal dispute, while Chinese authorities blame the company in part for the delay of a landmark nuclear project.
U.S. and other foreign companies are now struggling to keep their hold in China, the industrys biggest growth market and a rare bright spot more than three years after the Fukushima disaster in Japan put many of the worlds nuclear projects on hold. Yet China is increasingly turning to local companies to build crucial parts for multibillion-dollar nuclear projects, a result of Chinese industrial nationalism and frustration over U.S. supplier problems.
With the global nuclear industry focused on China, the Chinese government has used the heft of its huge market to secure transfers of key technology and gradually localize production. In the process, China is achieving a political aim to source sensitive manufacturing at home and satisfying a practical need to avoid complications posed by faraway suppliers.
One of those supplier issues has surfaced in eastern Chinas Zhejiang province, where Pennsylvanias Westinghouse Electric Co. is building the first of four of its most advanced, commercially available reactor, the AP1000, in China. Local authorities blame two-year delays in part on quality problems related to Curtiss-Wright. In a written statement, Curtiss-Wright said it has refined and improved our design processes as a result.
This sort of thing has damaged U.S. companies reputations here, said Li Ning, a nuclear-industry expert at Chinas Xiamen University. Chinese companies are really growing and basically squeezing out the international suppliers.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
They still don’t know how to make decent concrete.
The somewhat ‘funny’ thing is this... All anyone who ever thought of doing business with China, (either one, Peoples Republic or just Republic), had to do is walk through the open air markets of Taipei or Beijing and look at the goods for sale.
It’s all right there in plain view that, Intellectual Property, either copyrights or patents are just a vague guideline and that is is not only permissible to steal them but very profitable too. But noooo... these guys, (foreign devil businessmen), are too smart, they ‘know’ that when dealing with the upper levels of Chinese society that theft of IP is ‘just not done’.
And they just become another sheared sheep, slaughtered cow, etc. and that the next ‘too smart’ businessman will ignore their warnings to him and the cycle will continue.
We stole gunpowder from them so we owe them.
Contrary to what the article is trying to portray,
the Chinese are not close to becoming a top supplier of nuclear plants.
They screwed up the steam generators at Yangjiang Unit 2 (a take off of an Areva design) pretty bad because they lack an understanding of the importance foreign object control. They lack any kind of QA program, which means that they are a long way from selling nuke plants outside of China.
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