Asia-Pacific is home to a rise in new self-made billionaires
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
And Bitmain? Is it tech wealth creation to sell pick-axes to desperate miners looking for a gold rush? This looks to me like instead, a zero-sum trade, wherein someone got rich, and everyone else was left holding the bag for a device that would be worthless in a few months.
Of all of those on the list, DJI looks like the most legit, self-made success story, producing a very high quality, Apple-like experience in innovative drone devices, devices now used extensively by the film industry.
American brands are more competitive with Japanese brands in China due a fluke: as all of them are made in human labor intensive factories (vs. using more robots), the quality of Japanese designed cars has gone way down to the point that Toyota and Honda aren't thought of as being very good cars like they are in the states.
One financial analysis of Xiaomi I read (it's in Korean, I couldn't find anything in English) is that it is in part a lending company funded by float from manufacturing partners. Xiaomi has a personal loan product which grew by 100x in two years to ~1 billion. Liquidity comes from delay between retail sale to partner payment.
Since when scooters, air filters, and vacuums turned "not a tech?"
It's not a big enough industry to support their valuation. Many companies have developed clever equipment for the film industry over the decades[1] and none has been valued at $15bn for it[2]. As an example: Panavision sold for $622M last year.
They really need to (edit: continue to) be selling to consumers. That said, I agree completely about their quality and success.
[1] - Check out some cool stuff here: https://camerarevolution.com/
[2] - Kodak might have been, once upon a time, but I can't find a breakdown of their motion picture revenue so it's hard to say.
They're like the canary in the coal mine, a wakeup signal for the Silicon Valley that thinks they're still on top because design and innovation happens here, and China is only for lower-on-the-supply chain stuff. If companies like DJI replicate, and China gets a few dozen Samsungs and Sonys, which become global brands and symbols of high quality instead of regional brands, one of the shining sectors of the US will have been caught with its pants down by misjudging their competition yet again.
That said, they are one of the few phone companies left that allow consumers to unlock the bootloader, along with offering some stock android models with zero bloatware and monthly security updates.
Samsungs are worthless now if you can't install Lineage on them.
When we say the word “system”, it means a lot of foundation of system design and practices.
China companies lag in system design, this situation is very clear now; Still the root cause of this lag is related to the outdated government system.
Huh? I don't understand your point, as they DO sell to consumers, and are the best known drone brand as it is.
That's why I view this as selling pick-axes to unsuspecting and gullible farmers who sold their worldly possessions for the great gold rushes of the 1800s. The people selling the mining equivalent knew the vast majority of them would never earn anything. The best most amazing technologically advanced pick-axes in the world can still be a disrespectful business model.
An Antminer isn't a license to print money. It's a device for hashing blocks.
This is like calling Sony a scam because they sell video cameras to aspiring YouTube stars who never make money out of their aspirations.
It matters, because there are plenty of scams out there, where people exchange money in good faith and receive a substandard good, or nothing at all, in return.
If Bitmain does that, provide evidence. If it doesn't, stop making libelous statements about them.
You may not like their product. I would never buy it. But it isn't a scam.
However, the vast majority of people purchasing ASIC miners think they're going to make money from them.
Another example: GPUs, some people bought em for mining, but independent of mining they accelerate games and digital content creation, and lots of other useful computation.
It's the true believers who think cryptocurrencies are going to save the world from centralized banks who are getting scammed.
For example, the near monopolist laptop and phone hinge manufacturer RKX did not have a website up until relatively recently.
The same is true for the biggest slip rings manufacturer in China Jinpat - was virtually unheard of even among engineers in China. Everybody only knew them as the no name slip ring maker, but few knew that they control almost all the market for microminiature slip rings, and high performance ones.
The tech big players in China are actual tech companies, not websites.
Self made wealth is almost always a product of an entire community.
The reality is that wealth and "privilege" are a scale: no matter who you are in the world, there are both people above and below you, in terms of advantages.
Even then someone would say that it was still done from a position of privilege because you had a place to sleep, animals to hunt, and how dare you say you are self made - you at least had a job unlike many people in this fine country!
To me, "self-made" means being able to take the opportunities within the environment that you live in and make the best out of them. Yes, that usually means that you get some opportunities that other people don't get - but equally, there are opportunities that you don't get either. You can be a "self-made" white son of a billionaire. Or a "self-made" immigrant of colour. Alternatively, we can stop using the term "self-made" entirely and pretend that it doesn't exist. That's also a solution.
If the Chinese government steals trade secrets for its business and rigs the market in their favor, is that really "self made"?
Perhaps the title should be "party cadres and sons of the politically connected get richer".
Everyone is doing it, but in Western democracies you have to hide the fact because voters on all sides frown upon such cheating. Especially stealing from your closest allies who send their troops to die in your pointless wars.
The reality is China doesn't care about getting caught. Just like India shrugs off rescinding billion dollar pharmaceutical patents and starts exporting the generics around the world for huge profits despite never contributing a cent to R&D.
More like, Knighted by the Party?
Edit: Which is not to be all "America Yay!" and "China Boo!" like some high school rivalry. America's legendary wealth inequality objectively demonstrates that it, too, leans closer to "making one guy a billionaire" than it does to "giving everybody a dollar."
So more like giving everyone 85 dollars a day, than one.
https://medium.com/@b.essiambre/the-world-deserves-a-pay-rai...
There is no reason for a correction if they continue running a sufficiently inflationary monetary policy.
Where I depart is: wages adjust much more slowly than assets. Wages are negotiated over long spans of time vs. liquid assets. Wage holders think they're negotiating for real value X but it's eroded. Just look at baby boomers. Their wage flows are ~ fixed. Sure many get the benefit of asset appreciation but the ones that don't (get word) are crushed.
Europe and Japan are still very problematic however.
The simple fact that people, businesses and banks hoard cash and government bonds instead of doing sufficient investment to keep people employed is strong evidence to me that the returns on government paper is above market. Excess reserves are high into these parts of the world.
A more widely recognized sign is that they keep undershooting their inflation target.
For arguments from real economists, look around these parts https://www.davidbeckworth.com/popular, https://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/nic... or https://faculty.insead.edu/fatas/
One thing you can't rely on is the fact that central bank rates are zero in the problematic places. Zero is a high, above market rate when the equilibrium is negative. As I tried to emphasize in my medium post, negative rates can be quite normal and natural. If marginal private assets don't have a positive real rate on a risk adjusted, liquidity adjusted basis, the government shouldn't provide an artificial substitute. If they do, it puts a gridlock in large parts of the economy.
China inflated the value of its currency, they didn't inflate it by printing more (quite the opposite actually). This makes it harder for Chinese companies to do trade, not easier, so I don't see what your point is.
However, if the RMB is overvalued (meaning they say it is worth more than it is actually), then capital controls are very necessary. If the RMB was undervalued, then you would need more controls in the opposite direction (for money coming in) to prevent arbitrage.
Right now the RMB is overvalued, but not by much. Maybe it should be 7 or 7.5 RMB/dollar.
America is a lot less capitalist than it once was [0, 1] total government spending has gone from 10% GDP around the 1930 great depression (so, 9 private dollars for every public dollar) to about 30% post 1950 including State & Local government (2 private dollars per public dollar). I'm not sure how to interpret it, but spending on military also seems to have plummeted since the 60s as a % of spending. The military spending was where the research for things like the internet was done, so that might be meaningful. It seems very reasonable that the impacts of research and tax impacts on savings play out over 20-30 year timeframes (low risk capital investment pays itself back over ~15-20 years which sets up a natural cadence).
As the world becomes competitive for the first time since the end of the cold war, issues of how to generate new wealth very rapidly become important. America won't be able to harvest resources from foreign climes (eg, the Middle East) as freely now that China is starting to move beyond its boarders; to say nothing of potential changes in India or other Asian countries.
[0] http://metrocosm.com/history-of-us-taxes/ [1] https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown_1930USpt_20ps...
The era of stupid we are in now will have dramatic impact on the rest of this century.
And when is America can reach the chinese market or except a few one way only.
And it is not just about money but those people use the money for. Re-educate Muslim in or next time American in ... good luck.
But it is important to have competition.
When they produce something like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google I'll reconsider my position.
China seems to making serious strides with clean tech, AI, and space exploration. This is definitely an area of concern for the rest of the world.
I think China may be ahead of the US in AI and space right now, I don't know to be honest. What do you think?
also aliexpress is my go to store for electronic parts these days
Six of the ten richest people on earth are US tech billionaires.
Out of the 63 technology billionaires in the top 500 global richest that Bloomberg tracks in their billionaires list, 32 are in the US. China has 13.
Here's the breakdown of technology billionaires in the Bloomberg top 500 rich list by country (the list cuts off at $3.7b):
US 32, China 13, Germany 5, Canada 3, India 2, Japan 2, Australia 2, Brazil 1, South Korea 1, France 1, Taiwan 1
(Eduardo Saverin gets listed for Brazil, I'd probably list him for Singapore however)
Over time you realistically can't have a China with an economy the size of the US (the two economies will be larger than $30 trillion each before China reaches parity, assuming they ever do), without them having an enormous amount of tech wealth. The two will likely represent ~45% of the entire global economy in terms of output over the next few decades. In terms of millionaires, it'll be closer to 75% of all millionaires on earth between the two giants (the US by itself as of just a few years ago had about 45% of all millionaires; I assume China has taken a few more points in that time). The last problem the US has right now, is a concern about an upending of its tech wealth creation. Most of China's tech wealth is entirely isolated domestically, the US was never going to be allowed to own that market, and can't own that market going forward. China's tech companies can't own the US market and never will. It's the rest of the globe that is up for grabs, and the US will always win that battle because the rich liberal world trusts China drastically less than the US. So long as China retains its current system (as opposed to resuming the Deng liberalization path), that will remain true. Would I rather use business software from Salesforce (US) or Atlassian (AU) or SAP (Germany), or China? Or nearly any cloud software for that matter. Among the more liberal nations, that remains a very easy decision. China can't compete outside of its borders in most circumstances when data, speech/expression/social/media, privacy, etc. are involved.
Out of the top 100 software companies by sales in the world, the US currently has 73 of them.
Here's a short list of US tech companies which have either been founded or seen most of their growth over the last 10-15 years:
Facebook $477b, Salesforce $120b, Uber ~$80b-$120b, Airbnb ~$40b, Workday $41b, ServiceNow $41b, Square $30b, Stripe $23b, Twitter $23b, Palo Alto Networks $21b, Splunk $19b, Lyft $15b, Fortinet $14b, Pinterest $12b, Snap $12b, GoDaddy $12b, Twilio $11b, Dropbox $10b, Ultimate Software $10b, Okta $9b, Nutanix $9b, Zendesk $8b, DocuSign $8b, Grubhub $8b, Instacart $8b, Qualtrics $8b, Coinbase $8b, Slack $7b, Zillow $7b, Github $7b (acq), Proofpoint $6b, Zscaler $6b, Etsy $6b, Hubspot $6b, Tanium $6b, MuleSoft $6b (acq), Pivotal $5b, LogMeIn $5b, MongoDB $5b, Robinhood $5b, Carvana $5b, RealPage $5b, DoorDash $4b, Pure Storage $4b, Snowflake $4b, Alteryx $4b, Houzz $4b, Medidata $4b, Anaplan $4b, Credit Karma $4b, Qualys $4b, CarGurus, Box, Cloudera, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Stitch Fix, ZocDoc, Eventbrite, SendGrid, Reddit, Zuora, SecureWorks, etc.
You could add dozens of companies to that list. You could also split off AWS, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram as well, as large tech businesses whose growth has soared over the last decade. Netflix was a still small $3b company just ten years ago. Google has also seen the vast majority of its growth since ~2004-2005.
I don't see where there has been a slowdown or upending for the US in the last 10-15 years (which represents most of the China boom phase in terms of their value creation). China's expansion has been heavily isolated to its own territory when it comes to tech companies (Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Ctrip, ByteDance, JD.com, Didi Chuxing, et al.), leaving the US free to continue doing what it has been in tech for decades without having to actually compete globally with China in most tech segments. Their tech expansion hasn't come at the expense of the US in other words.
Bloomberg isn’t claiming Sachin’s has surpassed the US completely. They’re making a comment based on trends.
So that leaves the investment. Then others are investing in all these tech companies.. it is a cyclic dependency graph if you trace through the millions of nodes (assuming you get through the offshore accounts which I presume function as sinks). Then ... these companies are getting huge valuations because everyone else is investing more and more into them? Including themselves investing into themselves ?? When does the buck stop? Doesn’t this wealth need to be backed up ultimately by some gold bars ? Even if it’s fiat and fractional reserve .. so someone’s trust rating is ultimately taking a hit? Is the us printing this money out of thin air on the back of it’s huge credit ? I know the economy is too complex to be boiled down like this but where are these 100x increases in billions coming from ultimately? People credit ratings summed over millions of people ?
I never took any Econ courses so admittedly my Econ is terrible.
What happens if Xi Jinping decides that he wants something that you do not want? He will not let you vote if one day his foreign policy goals involve nice Americans.
Are you somehow not aware of this? They were a founding member of the UN, and have been on the Security Council since it's beginning. They have abstained or voted yes on every UN action that involves the SC (international peace and security).
Meng violated additional US laws... which she is only subject to because she was operating in the US. Just as a US citizen is subject to Chinese laws when operating in China. Surely you're not suggesting that foreigners should be allowed to go into another country and violate their laws without consequence.
The PRC became a permanent member of the Security Council (with a veto) only since 1971. Taiwan was the permanent member from 1945-1971.
Or Pinterest, Palantir, Uber, Lyft, Slack, Postmates, Asana, Casper.
Not really sure it should all be cast as a competition, but the wealth creation engine of the US is alive and well.