CleanMPG Forums - US imposes tariffs on underpriced solar imports from Chinese companies

CleanMPG Forums (http://www.cleanmpg.com/forums/index.php)

- In the News (http://www.cleanmpg.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=20)

- - US imposes tariffs on underpriced solar imports from Chinese companies (http://www.cleanmpg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43922)

Re: US imposes tariffs on underpriced solar imports from Chinese companies

Quote:

Originally Posted by jpleong (Post 345202)

And the industries in China are heavily subsidized and heavily supported by the government. China does not play by the same rules the US does. When you're a single business in the US competing against a Chinese business, you have to remember you're competing with the whole country.

:eyebrow: What nonsense... The Chinese government plays favorites as well. They don't fully back all Corporations there. As a CEO in China you need to buy off Politians in order to get what you want. As a consquence their businesses hampered by their own government more often than not.

My point was not that Apple is a monopoly, it was that Apple dominates the industries it is in without being a monopoly. The iPad literally killed its competition based on the margins Apple was able to exploit because of their superior R&D and superior supply chains it pulled from its existing product lines and market dominance (with the iPod and iPhone). It's been able to hold off competing "Ultrabooks" for three years now and will continue to do so.

First off iPad and iPhone only succeed since they were on the scene first! All the other competition are trying to make up ground for that fact alone. There are already better Tablets/Phones that are faster and more functional than the Ipad and Iphone. However Apple has entrenched their lead in the market. Their laptops are poorly designed in the sense for Life span. (Their laptops easily hit 100C because of their poor cooling design)

The same thing applies to China. It doesn't have a monopoly on cheap labor, but it dominates the market. It can effectively marshal its advantages and squash the competition if the competition doesn't have help.

What advantage they have in cheap labor now wont be forever. Their people are accumulating wealth and rising their standard of living. At the same time their government will stunt their growth and it will plateau. Then other nations with more limited government will have a crack at taking China's business.

(O.T.: Apple products, on the whole, are incredibly well designed and built. Blind statements attesting to Apple's success based upon "branding alone" are, um, uninformed at best.)

Well Designed and Built maybe, however their technology lags competition by years.
Have a very closed system that some people don't like.

Conservative economists don't. Conservative economists also think austerity is working. And then if it doesn't they find someone to blame. Same goes for liberal economists when a stimulus backfires.

JP

What Cost Cutting? Have you seen the budgets?

But it all comes down to morality. Is it moral to pick losers and winners?
I am for a free market that the consumers decide who wins and loses.

Re: US imposes tariffs on underpriced solar imports from Chinese companies

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kurz (Post 345214)

The only monopolies that did/do exist are sanctioned by the government.

Thanks for proving my point. :D

Re: US imposes tariffs on underpriced solar imports from Chinese companies

Quote:

Originally Posted by WriConsult (Post 345230)

Thanks for proving my point. :D

What Point? :eyebrow:

Re: US imposes tariffs on underpriced solar imports from Chinese companies

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kurz (Post 345220)

But it all comes down to morality. Is it moral to pick losers and winners?
I am for a free market that the consumers decide who wins and loses.

People decide winners and losers based on their own subjective reasons all the time. To answer your question, it becomes absolutely moral to pick winners and losers when that winner could be you or someone you care about.

This is the great flaw of the Objectivist philosophy. Humans are subjective beings, there's no way around it. Your knowledge of the world is based upon how you grew-up. You react to things and make decisions based upon the experiences you've accumulated throughout the many years you've grown. You read books, news, and (yes) Internet forums through the worldview lenses you've consciously or subconsciously decided to wear.

Your insistence that Apple dominates based on "branding alone" betrays the idea of "free markets" objectively deciding the better product. If, in fact, Apple products are inferior as you've characterized them to be then the market should never have allowed such failure to succeed in the first place. "Branding" being the ultimate extension of a subjectivist approach would suggest that the free market is not as free as you suggest they are.

The (off-topic) assessments of Apple are incredibly wrong. Not only was Apple not the first with a smartphone (*cough* Blackberry *cough*) nor a tablet but I submit to you (as a power-user who has used and uses both MS Windows-based and Apple computers for over a decade) that Apple machines are, indeed, very well designed and deserving of their hype. I have no less than four of the Mac laptops you claim have poor cooling designs. In "normal-person" use they do not get unusually warm (rarely do their fans even turn on) and in heavy use (editing and rendering multiple streams of HD footage) they have not exceed 85°C provided sufficient sway space. I have cooked (caused thermal shutdown) more than my fair share of HP, Dell, and Sony laptops -sometimes not even doing anything overly demanding.

The assertion that they "lag" behind in technology is also, sadly, untrue and a misunderstanding of their design philosophy. Apple makes products to fit a certain set of criteria (the closed-system you refer to). If integration of "new" technology causes the product to fall outside the bounds of that criteria, Apple is happy to wait for the technology to mature before integrating it; rather than disrupt the criteria it has set. For portable devices, a big criteria is battery life. That's why I'll never see a power-house GTX680 on a MBP, ever (though I wish I could...).

And Apple is an industry leader in many respects. They were the first to abandon the myriad of I/O connectors and standardized on USB, pioneered Firewire and Thunderbolt, etc... all the while making usability and accessibility as important as the reliability of their OS and software. The biggest example, to me, of how Apple has done an amazing job leading the industry can be summed up in just one word: magsafe.

Again, I'm a user of both platforms. I love (and hate) them both equally. Typing this on a PC, btw...

Back On-topic:
The Chinese do not adhere to an open-market, laissez-faire philosophy -and that's what I'm trying to get across in this thread. Most people in the West don't get it. China's (PRC) goal is world domination. I don't mean in the Kang & Kodos way but the Chinese government and people are incredibly nationalistic. The industry and economy is an extension of the government will. The Chinese government will always have the back of its industries because it is in their interest to succeed. They believe they can hold off discontent and reform if they can appease their people economically (a formula that seems to be working) and appear unified. Chinese companies (of significance) exist at the pleasure of the government. If a company threatens the status quo, they will not hesitate to shut it down. If a foreign country threatens their industry, they will fight dirty. In the next twenty-or-so years, it may even be open fighting (shooting, bombs, boom!).

It is nonsense, indeed, if you don't understand that they don't play by our rules or ideals.

JP

Re: US imposes tariffs on underpriced solar imports from Chinese companies

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kurz (Post 345236)

What Point? :eyebrow:

That China would price cut to kill off solar panel manufacturing in other countries so they can have a future monopoly?

Right now the solar industry is highly dependent on subsidies, subsidies and purchases are down so it's a great opportunity.

Note that the manufacturing monopoly doesn't necessarily mean Chinese companies. There's great economic value is in getting manufacturing of high-cost goods so the Chinese are happy for foreign companies to manufacture their panels in China. Of course, they're also smart enough to insist on joint ventures to help grow the domestic industry.

As electronics show, once manufacturing concentration is established it's extremely hard to fight it because of the dependency not just on the raw materials but the ecosystem of equipment and component suppliers. For example, the Raspberry Pi Foundation looked at manufacturing in the UK: it wasn't the cost of manufacturing that stopped them, it was supply of key components.

Similar ecosystem problems are faced by Toyota: Toyota wants to reduce the cost of/increase profits on the US Prius by building the Gen 4 in Mississippi, but if they can't get local manufacturing of the hybrid components they'll not be able to reduce the cost as much as they want to and the Prius sales/profits will continue to be hurt by the strong Yen.

Re: US imposes tariffs on underpriced solar imports from Chinese companies

Presidential politics?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddwood...igher-tariffs/

U.S. Hits Chinese Solar Manufacturers With Higher Tariffs

The U.S. Department of Commerce on Wednesday slapped Chinese biggest solar manufacturers with tariffs as high as 36%, concluding in a final ruling that they illegally dumped cheap photovoltaic cells on the American market.

The anti-dumping tariffs roughly mirrored those the Commerce Department issued in a preliminary ruling in May. But the department jacked up the anti-subsidy tariff. For Suntech, China’s biggest and most embattled solar manufacturer, the total tariff issued Wednesday jumped to nearly 47% from 34% in May. But the Commerce reduced the final tariffs by 10.54% to account for an export subsidy all manufacturers received.

The U.S. subsidiary of German manufacturer SolarWorld, which filed the trade case last year, has vowed to pursue other actions to stop Chinese manufacturers from selling solar cells they obtain outside China. The Commerce Department ruling only applies to photovoltaic cells made in China and companies like Suntech, Trina Solar and Yingli have moved to secure supplies from third countries that they can sell in the U.S. tariff-free.

“Assuming the International Trade Commission rules in our favor next month, we plan to ask the Commerce Department and Customs and Border Protection to address the circumvention issue through strict enforcement actions,” Gordon Brinser, president of SolarWorld Industries America, said in a statement.

The fight has divided the U.S. solar industry as solar installers and other companies have benefited from a 75% plunge in photovoltaic module prices over the past three years that resulted from Chinese manufacturers vastly expanding production, sometimes with the aid of government assistance and cheap bank loans

Re: US imposes tariffs on underpriced solar imports from Chinese companies

Hi Herm:

What concerns me most is the long term time frame that China can support its protected industries (almost infiniti actually) while our own solar industry is moving ahead and falling behind in fits and starts. How did Germany become such a great Solar Power? Was it with American panels? Chinese panels? No, it was with German panels so there is such a thing as protection in some form or fashion right there in Germany. Some may call it a patriotic influence but patriotic influences are just as protectionists as subsidizing.

The Japanese did it with cars and the German are doing the same. You can see it in the market share of domestic automobiles vs. imports in the US vs. Germany, France and Japan. VW and MB reliability has been on the bottom for years and their prices have always been near the top. This provides them with a “certain” market share here in the US. Yet in Germany, VW dominates. Why is that? The quality is not there. The pricing and buy German must be either through import tariffs, VAT or a combination of both?

I have no idea but rarely do you see a Chevrolet in Japan, a Chrysler in Germany or a Ford in Korea yet those are “supposedly” free markets as well?

We have been giving away the store in some respects and if our products in those country’s cost so many $’s over a given base MSRP, maybe their products sold here should have the same % over base MSRP here forced upon them? Hate to call it protectionism but we cannot be the free trade advocates when most of our competitors are doing everything but. And it is not just solar panels.

I am speaking over my head here so if someone can educate me, I would be greatly appreciative.

Wayne

Re: US imposes tariffs on underpriced solar imports from Chinese companies

People dont keep cars for a long time in Germany, perhaps that is the reason that they are highly regarded.. plus the VW cars tend to fit the tall nordic types.

There may be some corruption in China:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-1...t-reports.html

Wen Jiabao Family Linked to Billions in Assets, NYT Reports

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s extended family has controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion, the New York Times reported, citing corporate and regulatory records and unidentified people familiar with the family’s investments.

Among them is a holding in the name of Wen’s mother, Yang Zhiyun, in Ping An Insurance Co. that was valued at $120 million in 2007, the newspaper reported, citing public records, government-issued identity cards and an ownership trail to three investment entities. Cecile Zhang, a public relations official at Ping An, said she couldn’t immediately comment, and Ping An spokesman Sheng Ruisheng didn’t answer a call to his mobile phone.

Wen’s son, Winston, founded private equity firm New Horizon Capital, which has returned about $430 million to investors, a fourfold profit, since it began operations in 2005, the newspaper reported, citing SBI Holdings, a unit of Softbank Corp. (9984) Winston Wen has handed over day-to-day operations of the fund, according to the report. Horizon Capital didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

“Relevant press reports are intended to tarnish China’s image and have ulterior motives,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a briefing in Beijing today.
Diamond Companies

Wen’s wife, Zhang Beili, has through her management of state diamond companies helped relatives build a billion-dollar portfolio of investments in insurance, technology and real estate ventures, the newspaper reported.

The New York Times (NYT) found no holdings in Premier Wen’s name and no evidence that he used his political clout to influence the holdings, the report said.

After the story was published the Chinese government blocked access to the New York Times’s Chinese-language website in China and intermittently to its English-language website, the newspaper reported in a separate article.

Asked why the newspaper’s websites were blocked, Hong said China governs the Internet “according to laws and regulations.”