Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

The Chinese Copycat

Finally, we arrived at the facility, about one hour out from central Suzhou, where we looked at these massive things. It's incredible that if you have the vision, you can actually make things into reality.  Mr. Chemistry and Mr. Civil just went forward and made this amazing system that could reclaim soil.

The machine de-contaminates soil the same way a laundry machine washes dirty clothes. This facility could process thousands of tons a year.  Even though this machine was real and already doing the work it was created to do, it was still faced with many challenges ahead.  Would there be funding?  Would there be enough contracts for decontamination? Would there be copycats?

One of the biggest worries in bringing this technology to China is that within a few years there will be copycat products on the market. Your competition will place spies in your operation and figure out how you run, no matter how well you keep it hidden.  This fear makes investors hesitant to invest in your company, fearing that a cheaper copycat version will spring up and drain all the profits.

To be honest, I think that particular worry is overplayed.  It's not so easy to copy; I mean if you're thinking about doing that, you'll get found out, and it's not like a little piece of something that you're copying. You're copying a huge machine, after all.

The main point is that you should go into China with the belief that you will be copied in mind.  The best approach would be to go to the government and secure a contract, in this case, a lot of land that needs soil to be reclaimed, before actually building the facility to do it.

I can see this fear of being copied being a big barrier for innovation in China if this attitude is not corrected.

China isn’t all cheap labour and copycats, in higher-tier cities such as Ningbo, houses can cost up to 1 million dollars Canadian.  Even the condos can cost up to 300,000 Canadian dollars, and even then, all you get is an empty shell, which you have to fill with windows and floor tiles and sinks.

Canada has a trade agreement with China and part of this is a technology exchange program. Essentially, engineers from Canada can come over and bring technology to China in various ways. There are also entrant's bursaries and things that are supposed to help with this initiative. I met the trade secretary from Beijing who came down to see this opening event. It was very interesting; these are people with whom I would never normally rub shoulders, but here I was talking to the ambassador’s secretary.

What amazed me about the trips were the people and the impact that we can have if we set our minds to do something. We took a lot of pictures at the machine; we saw it working, and it was pretty amazing, like a giant washing machine for dirt. What comes out at the end is clean dirt. It's just fantastic seeing this as an engineer able to appreciate how things are built.