经济学人:The end of cheap China

作者:2012年3月10日经济学人
What do soaring Chinese wages mean for global manufacturing?


TRAVEL by ferry from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, in one of the regions that makes China the workshop of the world, and an enormous billboard greets you: “Time is Money, Efficiency is Life”.

China is the world's largest manufacturing power. Its output of televisions, smartphones, steel pipes and other things you can drop on your foot surpassed America's in 2010. China now accounts for a fifth of global manufacturing. Its factories have made so much, so cheaply that they have curbed inflation in many of its trading partners. But the era of cheap China may be drawing to a close.
Costs are soaring, starting in the coastal provinces where factories have historically clustered (see map). Increases in land prices, environmental and safety regulations and taxes all play a part. The biggest factor, though, is labour.
On March 5th Standard Chartered, an investment bank, released a survey of over 200 Hong Kong-based manufacturers operating in the Pearl River Delta. It found that wages have already risen by 10% this year. Foxconn, a Taiwanese contract manufacturer that makes Apple's iPads (and much more besides) in Shenzhen, put up salaries by 16-25% last month.
“It's not cheap like it used to be,” laments Dale Weathington of Kolcraft, an American firm that uses contract manufacturers to make prams in southern China. Labour costs have surged by 20% a year for the past four years, he grumbles. China's coastal provinces are losing their power to suck workers out of the hinterland. These migrant workers often go home during the Chinese New Year break. In previous years 95% of Mr Weathington's staff returned. This year only 85% did.
Kolcraft's experience is typical. When the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai asked its members recently about their biggest challenges, 91% mentioned “rising costs”. Corruption and piracy were far behind. Labour costs (including benefits) for blue-collar workers in Guangdong rose by 12% a year, in dollar terms, from 2002 to 2009; in Shanghai, 14% a year. Roland Berger, a consultancy, reckons the comparable figure was only 8% in the Philippines and 1% in Mexico.
Joerg Wuttke, a veteran industrialist with the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, predicts that the cost to manufacture in China could soar twofold or even threefold by 2020. AlixPartners, a consultancy, offers this intriguing extrapolation: if China's currency and shipping costs were to rise by 5% annually and wages were to go up by 30% a year, by 2015 it would be just as cheap to make things in North America as to make them in China and ship them there (see chart). In reality, the convergence will probably be slower. But the trend is clear.
If cheap China is fading, what will replace it? Will factories shift to poorer countries with cheaper labour? That is the conventional wisdom, but it is wrong.
Advantage China
Brian Noll of PPC, which makes connectors for televisions, says his firm seriously considered moving its operations to Vietnam. Labour was cheaper there, but Vietnam lacked reliable suppliers of services such as nickel plating, heat treatment and special stamping. In the end, PPC decided not to leave China. Instead, it is automating more processes in its factory near Shanghai, replacing some (but not all) workers with machines.
Labour costs are often 30% lower in countries other than China, says John Rice, GE's vice chairman, but this is typically more than offset by other problems, especially the lack of a reliable supply chain. GE did open a new plant in Vietnam to make wind turbines, but Mr Rice insists that talent was the lure, not cheap labour. Thanks to a big government shipyard nearby, his plant was able to hire world-class welders. Except in commodity businesses, “competence will always trump cost,” he says.
Sunil Gidumal, a Hong Kong-based entrepreneur, makes tin boxes that Harrods, Marks & Spencer and other retailers use to hold biscuits. Wages, which make up a third of his costs, have doubled in the past four years at his factories in Guangdong. Workers in Sri Lanka are 35-40% cheaper, he says, but he finds them less efficient. So he is keeping a smaller factory in China to serve America and China's domestic market. Only the tins bound for Europe are made in Sri Lanka, since shipping costs are lower than from China.
Louis Kuijs of the Fung Global Institute, a think-tank, observes that some low-tech, labour-intensive industries, such as T-shirts and cheap trainers, have already left China. And some firms are employing a “China + 1” strategy, opening just one factory in another country to test the waters and provide a back-up.
But coastal China has enduring strengths, despite soaring costs. First, it is close to the booming Chinese domestic market. This is a huge advantage. No other country has so many newly pecunious consumers clamouring for stuff.
Second, Chinese wages may be rising fast, but so is Chinese productivity. The precise numbers are disputed, but the trend is not. Chinese workers are paid more because they are producing more.
Third, China is huge. Its labour pool is large and flexible enough to accommodate seasonal industries that make Christmas lights or toys, says Ivo Naumann of AlixPartners. In response to sudden demand, a Chinese factory making iPhones was able to rouse 8,000 workers from their dormitory and put them on the assembly line at midnight, according to the New York Times. Not the next day. Midnight. Nowhere else are such feats feasible.
Fourth, China's supply chain is sophisticated and supple. Professor Zheng Yusheng of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business argues that the right way to measure manufacturing competitiveness is not by comparing labour costs alone, but by comparing entire supply chains. Even if labour costs are a quarter of those in China to make a given product, the unreliability or unavailability of many components may make it uneconomic to make things elsewhere.
Dwight Nordstrom of Pacific Resources International, a manufacturing consultancy, reckons China's supply chain for electronics manufacturers is so good that “there is no stopping the juggernaut” for at least ten to 20 years. This same advantage applies to low-tech industries, too. Paul Stocker of Topline, a shoe exporter with dozens of contract plants in coastal China, says there is no easy alternative to China.
It is fashionable to predict that China's inland factories will supplant its coastal ones. Official figures for foreign direct investment support this view: some inland provinces, such as Chongqing, now attract almost as much foreign money as Shanghai. The reason why fewer migrant workers from the hinterland are returning to coastal factories this year is that there are plenty of jobs closer to home.
But manufacturers are not simply shifting inland in search of cheap labour. For one thing, it is not much cheaper. Huawei, a large Chinese telecoms firm, reports that salaries for engineers with a master's degree are not even 10% lower in its inland locations than in Shenzhen. Kolcraft considered shifting to Hubei, but found that total costs would end up being only 5-10% lower than on the coast.
Topline looked into moving inland, but found huge extra costs there. Infrastructure for exports is still shoddy or slow (shipping by river adds a week), logistics are not fully developed and Topline's entire supply chain remains on the coast. It decided to stay put.
Inland revenue?
Moving inland brings all sorts of unexpected costs. Newish labour laws in wealthy places such as Shenzhen make it costlier to shut down plants there, for example. It can cost more to ship goods from the Chinese interior to the coast than from Shanghai to New York. Managers and other highly skilled staff often demand steep pay rises to move from sophisticated coastal cities to the boondocks. Chongqing has more than 30m people, but it's not Shanghai. A recent anti-corruption campaign there grew so violent that it terrified legitimate businessfolk as well as crooks.
The firms investing in China's interior are chiefly doing so to serve consumers who live there. With so many inland cities booming, this is an enticing market. But when it comes to making iPads and smartphones for export, the world's workshop will remain in China's coastal provinces.
In time, of course, other places will build better roads and ports and supply chains. Eventually, they will challenge coastal China's grip on basic manufacturing. So if China is to flourish, its manufacturers must move up the value chain. Rather than bolting together sophisticated products designed elsewhere, they need to do more design work themselves. Taking a leaf out of Germany's book, they need to make products with higher margins and offer services to complement them.
A few Chinese firms have started to do this already. A visit to Huawei's huge corporate campus in Shenzhen is instructive. The firm was founded by a former military officer and has been helped by friends in government over the years, but it now more closely resembles a Western high-tech firm than it does a state-backed behemoth. Its managers are top-flight. Its leaders have for several years been learning from dozens of resident advisers from IBM and other American consultancies. It has become highly professional, and impressively innovative.
In 2008 it filed for more international patents than any other firm. Earlier this year, it unveiled the world's thinnest and fastest smartphones. In a sign that at least China's private sector is beginning to take intellectual-property rights seriously, Huawei is locked in bitter battles over patents, not only with multinationals but also with ZTE, a cross-town rival that also wants to shift from being a low-cost telecoms-equipment maker to a creator of sexy new consumer products.
China does not yet have enough Huaweis. But it attracts plenty of bright young people who would like to build one. Every year another wave of “sea turtles”—Chinese who have studied or worked abroad—returns home. Many have mixed with the world's best engineers at MIT and Stanford. Many have seen first-hand how Silicon Valley works. Indeed, Silicon Valley veterans have founded many of China's most innovative firms, such as Baidu.
The pace of change in China has been so startling that it is hard to keep up. The old stereotypes about low-wage sweatshops are as out-of-date as Mao suits. The next phase will be interesting: China must innovate or slow down.



廉价中国的终结

中国工资飙高对全球制造业意味着什么?

从香港乘坐渡轮到深圳,你会看到巨大的广告牌欢迎你,上面写着:“时间就是金钱,效率就是生命”,深圳是几个让中国成为世界工厂的地域之一。

中国现在是世界上最大的制造国家。中国生产的电视,智能手机,钢管以及其他实物于2010年超过了美国。中国现在占全球制造业的五分之一。中国的工厂曾经造出了如此众多的,如此廉价的商品,足以抑制中国贸易伙伴国家的通货膨胀。但是便宜中国造的时代也许正渐渐离我们远去。

成本在飞速上升,这适于沿海诸省,因为历史原因,工厂在沿海省市扎堆。土地价格的上涨,环境安全条例的规范,税收都是成本上升的原因。尽管如此,主要因素是劳动力。

三月五日,渣打投资银行公布了一份调查,是关于200家在珠江三角洲地区生产的香港的制造公司的。调查显示,今年工资已经涨了一成。富士康是一家台湾公司,按照合约在深圳为苹果公司制造ipad,上月公司将工资上调了16-25%。

"劳动力没有过去便宜了,"美国公司Kolcraft的Dale Weathington叹息道,该公司在中国南方以合约制造公司制造手推车。Dale Weathington抱怨道,劳动力成本在过去四年中每年飙升20%。中国沿海省市正在失去将工人从老家吸引过来的能力。这些农民工经常趁农历新年回家。去年,只有95%的工人回来了。今年只有85%的工人节后返回公司。

Kolcraft公司的经历是很典型的。当美国驻上海商会询问商会成员什么是他们最大的挑战,91%的公司提到了“上涨的成本”,贪污腐败徇私不透明则不那么构成威胁。广东蓝领工人的劳动力成本以美元计算,从2002年到2009年,每年上涨了12%,上海上涨了14%。咨询顾问Roland Berger认为,可比较的数字在菲律宾仅有8%,在墨西哥仅有1%。

欧盟驻华商会的老兵实业家Joerg Wuttke预测,中国的制造成本在2020年之前将会增长一倍,甚至增长两倍。咨询公司AlixPartners给出了有趣的外推法:如果中国的货币和货运费每年增长5%,工资每年增长30%,2015年前,在中国制造然后运往美国将会跟在美国本土制造一样便宜。事实上,成本相等的汇合点可能不会那么早到来。但是这个趋势很显然将会继续发展下去。

如果便宜中国造正在离我们远去,谁将取代中国?工厂会迁往充满廉价劳动力的贫穷国家吗?传统观点这样认为,但是这大错特错。

Advantage China 中国势优

PPC公司为电视制造连接器,公司的Brian Noll认为,他的公司正在考虑迁往越南。越南的劳动力更便宜,但是越南没有可靠的加工服务来源,诸如镀镍,热处理,特种锻压加工等。最后,PPC公司决定留在中国。反而,公司在上海周围的工厂中,加工处理更加自动化,取代工人运作机械。

美国通用电气副主席 John Rice说,跟中国相比,其他国家的劳动力成本要低30%,但是经常这些成本节约被其他问题抹平,特别是供应链稳定性的欠缺。通用电气确实在越南开厂制造风动涡轮吗,但 John Rice坚称,越南的人才而不是廉价劳动力是吸引公司开厂的理由。多亏了附近的大型国有造船厂,通用电气的工厂才能够雇佣到世界一流的电焊工。除了商品制造业, John Rice说,“能力往往胜过成本”。

香港企业家Sunil Gidumal为英国哈罗兹和马莎百货等零售商制造饼干铁盒。员工工资占成本的三分之一,在过去的四年中,广东公司员工的工资增长了一倍。斯里兰卡的工人工资要低35-40%,但是他们不太高效,Sunil Gidumal说。所以Sunil Gidumal一直保留在中国的一家小工厂满足美国和中国国内市场。只有销往欧洲的铁盒是在斯里兰卡制造的,运输成本也比从中国运出要低。

香港智库经纶国际经济研究院(Fung Global Institute)Louis Kuijs注意到,某些低科技含量,劳动密集型的工业,比如T恤和廉价运动鞋制造商,已经离开中国。某些公司采用中国+1的模式,在保留在中国的大本营做后盾的情况下,在另一国家仅先开办一家分公司试水。

但是成本飙涨,中国沿海地区还是享有持久优势。第一,这里靠近繁荣的中国国内市场。这是一巨大优势。没有其他任何国家有如此众多新富消费者,对商品趋之若鹜。

第二,中国工资上涨很快,一同上涨的还有中国的生产力。精确的数字虽众说纷纭,但是趋势却无人质疑。中国工人的工资高,因为他们生产力强。

第三,中国幅员辽阔。中国的劳动力储备非常大,很有弹性,这足以季节性产业的需求,比如圣诞彩灯和玩具,AlixPartners公司的Ivo Naumann说。根据《纽约时报》报道,为了应对需求突然激增,中国iPhones工厂能够在午夜从宿舍叫醒8000名工人,让他们回到生产线旁生产,而不是等到第二天。没有其他任何地方能够如此具有行动力。

第四,中国的供应链复杂而灵活。长江商学院的Zheng Yusheng教授认为,正确测定制造竞争力的方法不能单单比较劳动力成本,而要比较整个供应链。就算在中国制造产品的劳动力成本高达四分之一,很多部件质量不可靠或者拿不到的问题,让在其他国家制造产品显得不经济。

制造咨询公司Pacific Resources International的Dwight Nordstrom认为,中国电子厂商的供应链如此完美,没有十年二十年根本无法撼动中国的主宰地位。同样的优势也适用于低科技产业。鞋子出口公司Topline在中国沿海拥有众多合约工厂,该公司的Paul Stacker说,想找到中国的替代不容易。

目前大家纷纷预测中国内陆工厂将取代沿海工厂。国外直接投资的官方数据说明了这一点:某些内陆省份,例如重庆,吸引外资数额跟上海一样高。这就是为什么今年越来越少的工人返回沿海工厂工作,因为离家近的地方工作机会也很多。

但是制造商不单单是为了廉价劳动力才转战内陆的。一方面,劳动力成本还没有特别廉价。中国大型电信公司华为说,内陆具有硕士文凭工程师的薪水不比深圳的工程师薪水低10%。Kolcraft曾考虑迁往湖北,但是发现总成本也只比沿海低5-10%。

Topline打算搬往内陆,但是发现需要花费数额巨大的成本。内陆的出口基础设施依然缓慢恶劣(河运要多花一个星期)。内陆物流发展不甚完美,而且公司整个供应链仍然集中在沿海地区。Topline确定留在沿海。

Inland revenue? 国内税收?

迁往内陆带来多种意想不到的成本。根据富裕地区如深圳刚刚出台的劳动法,在这里关闭工厂费用更高。将货物从中国内陆运往沿海地区的货运费,甚至比从海上运往纽约的费用还要高。而从沿海城市迁往内地不发达地区,经理和其他高技能雇员要求加薪。重庆现居超过3千万人,但毕竟不是上海。最近反腐运动在重庆轰轰烈烈的举行,这不仅赶走了恶棍,也吓坏了守法商人。

在中国内陆投资的公司主要是满足当地消费者的需求。如今,众多内陆城市经济蓬勃发展,本身就是一个诱人的市场。但是说到为出口制造iPad和智能手机,世界工厂还是会建在中国沿海各省。

假以时日,中国其他地区当然会修建畅通的道路,方便的港口,提供完善的供应链。最终,内陆各省会挑战沿海各省对基础制造业的控制地位。所以随着中国继续繁荣发展,中国的制造商必须提升价值链。中国需要自己设计更多的产品,而非简简单单将别国设计的复杂商品用螺丝连接起来而已。中国需要学习德国的成功经验,制造更多高利润商品,为完善补足商品提供服务。

已经有几家中国公司开始这样做了。去一趟华为在深圳巨大的生产园收益良多。华为的创始人原来是个军人,几年来受到在政府工作朋友的帮助,但是跟众多现在华为越来越像西方的高科技公司,而不是一个有国家撑腰的巨大公司。华为的经理是世界一流的。华为的领导几年来一直在跟IBM和其他美国咨询公司的常驻顾问学习。现在华为非常专业,非常创新,令人印象深刻。

2008年,跟别的公司相比,华为申请了更多国际专利。今年早些时候,华为刚刚揭幕了世界上最薄,速度最快的智能手机。虽然有迹象表明,至少中国的私有企业开始重视知识产权了,但是华为还被禁锢在专利的斗争中,不仅仅是跟跨国企业竞争,也是跟同城中兴通信的竞争,后者是一家低成本通信器材制造商,试图转型制造吸引更多消费者的产品。

中国像华为这样的公司还不够多。但是已经吸引了众多有为青年,创立跟华为一样的公司。每一年,一批又一批的"海龟"(在国外上学工作的中国人)回到祖国。很多海龟曾经在麻省理工,斯坦福和世界上最优秀的工程师打交道。很多海龟第一手地了解硅谷是如何运作的。确实,来自硅谷的老手创立了中国最具创新能力的公司,百度就是一个例子。

中国变革的步伐如此快速,人们很难跟上。旧时低工资的血泪工厂的刻板成见,跟中山装一样已经不流行了。中国的下一阶段将非常有趣:要么创新,要么后退。

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