The Road to Change Made in China

In 2012, China's manufacturing industry was in trouble both internally and externally. On the one hand, labor costs and the prices of production materials have risen. On the other hand, some European and American companies have intensified their relocation actions. For example, Ford Motor in the United States plans to relocate 12,000 jobs from Mexico and China.

In the new round of global industrial transfer reshuffle, developed countries are trying to seize the commanding heights of the new round of technological and industrial transformation. Faced with aggressive international competitors, how should China's manufacturing industry respond? Chinese and foreign entrepreneurs and experts who participated in this Summer Davos Forum proposed solutions in terms of development model, talent cultivation and value chain extension.

China's manufacturing industry faces the impact of the new industrial revolution

The famous British magazine "The Economist" recently proposed that the digitalization of manufacturing will lead the third industrial revolution. At the Summer Davos Forum, which is known for its global industry outlook, the participating entrepreneurs and experts generally believed that the pressures facing China's manufacturing industry were prominently manifested in the decline of cost advantages, hollowing out technology and backward development models.

Carlos Ghosn, chairman of the Renault-Nissan alliance, said the average labor cost in Vietnam's auto industry is about one-third of China's, giving it an advantage in production. Feike Sijbesma, CEO of Royal DSM Group, said that some multinational companies have chosen to transfer their production workshops from coastal China to Southeast Asian countries, which shows that the cost advantage of China's manufacturing industry is gradually diminishing and must be paid great attention to. .

Xu Heyi, chairman of BAIC Group, believes that the biggest challenge facing China's manufacturing industry from large to strong is the hollowing out of industrial technology. Taking China's auto industry as an example, although China's auto manufacturing industry has developed rapidly in recent years, it has become the world's largest auto industry. A big manufacturing country, but we are blank in core technology and products. The entire manufacturing industry, including the automotive industry, is a challenge to technological innovation and the creation of core technologies.

In September 2011, the world's first 3D printer-made car was unveiled in Winnipeg, Canada. The "third industrial revolution" represented by 3D printers and intelligent robots is having a subversive impact on traditional manufacturing. "The technological progress of the global automobile industry has changed from quantitative to qualitative, and automobiles have become the carrier of high-tech. This makes it more difficult for China's automobile industry to catch up with the world's advanced level." Xu Heyi said.

Hans-Paul Bürkner, former CEO of Boston Consulting Group, said Chinese companies should use a more frugal development model - both in terms of labor costs and resource consumption, China's space is not as rich as it used to be . The way of development should begin to shift.

Can Chinese manufacturing companies surpass advanced countries in some areas with the help of the third industrial revolution? When answering the reporter's question, Dr. Liu Chengyuan, chairman of Shenzhen Hezhong Consulting 3A Enterprise Management Consultant, who has been researching China's manufacturing industry for a long time, said that any technological breakthrough or revolution is a process from quantitative change to qualitative change, and there is not enough accumulation. , relying on the Great Leap Forward-style industrial investment is tantamount to pulling the seedlings to encourage growth. Facing the challenges brought by the third industrial revolution, Chinese enterprises must work hard on industrial equipment and core technologies to avoid being at a disadvantage.

Cultivating talents and promoting the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry

The third industrial revolution requires that the labor of workers on the production site be upgraded to skilled and knowledge-based. The lack of advanced manufacturing technology R&D talents and knowledge-based employees, coupled with many institutional barriers restricting the flow of high-end talents, have become the main challenges for China's manufacturing industry. The third industrial revolution is a technological revolution, and its core lies in the introduction and cultivation of talents.

Royal DSM Group CEO Xie Baiman said that as more and more high-tech products such as green and energy-saving products are put into the market in the manufacturing field, many Chinese manufacturing enterprises have put technological development in the core area of development. "Chinese manufacturing enterprises should also increase talent training, and extend more and more labor from the production line to the entire supply chain, such as management, logistics, marketing and other fields."

Deloitte Global Industry Leadership Partner Gai Gary Coleman (Gary Coleman) believes that our criterion for judging the future manufacturing industry is mainly talents, especially innovative talents and management talents. Because there are global innovative talents and management talents in this new manufacturing industry, they can not only improve the efficiency in production, but also increase the value of the global value chain.

"The growth of manufacturing enterprises is mainly achieved through two open source methods: amplifying sales and increasing added value. Innovative talents are the core elements for enterprises to forge their competitiveness. For the manufacturing industry, management talents and Innovative talents are very important, and the former is even more important. For example, Huawei has excellent R&D personnel, but if there is no strong management team to stimulate their desire for innovation, no matter how good people are, they are useless." Liu Chengyuan said .

China's manufacturing industry generally has the problem of "emphasizing technological transformation and neglecting management upgrading" or "emphasizing technology introduction and neglecting management learning". In the past 30 years, Chinese enterprises have spent a lot of money to introduce equipment and technology, and they lacked understanding of the importance of management, so that with first-class equipment and super-first-class factories, they could only produce second-class and third-class products.

The good news is that more and more business managers realize the importance of management and manager training. Liu Chengyuan said that the training of manufacturing managers is different from the training of general business talents. Business schools and training in the usual sense cannot cultivate qualified talents, because they need to face a multi-variable factor (human, machine, material, The complex system of law and the ring) needs to have more awareness and ability.

He suggested that cultivating manufacturing management talents needs to start from three aspects: first, to develop a correct management personality through education, that is, to establish a correct management belief, for example, the poor work of subordinates must be the responsibility of the manager; second, Systematic study of various scientific and effective management methods; thirdly, through long-term training, the awareness and ability to discover and solve problems are accumulated. Under the leadership of the top management of the enterprise, actively promoting lean improvement activities and promoting the full participation of employees can greatly shorten the process of cultivating outstanding talents.

Extending to key value points

International Monetary Fund Vice President Zhu Min pointed out at the Summer Davos Forum on September 13 that slowing exports and increasingly frequent capital flows are affecting Asia's continued leadership in world economic growth. challenge. "The foundation of improving the Asian economy is still to revitalize the manufacturing industry." Zhu Min said, "On the one hand, the manufacturing industry must be transferred to the upstream of the industrial chain to achieve sustainable development of the manufacturing industry, and on the other hand, the construction of the financial system must be accelerated. The industrial chain provides good financial services."

In the view of Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn, many manufacturing powerhouses, including Japan and South Korea, all started with the production of low-end manufacturing products and eventually entered the high-end product area. China has the guarantees of labor, policies and other aspects needed to develop high-end manufacturing. There is no obstacle to the transition to the high-end field, and all it takes is gradual time.

Liu Chengyuan believes that it is biased to talk about the development of manufacturing industry up the value chain. Because it cannot be said that the upstream of the value chain must be highly profitable. Different industries have different positions in the key value chain. For example, in the value chain of computer manufacturing, the upstream has key technologies, and it is good to be able to develop upstream; for example, in the value chain of automobiles, the engine in the middle reaches and the engine in the downstream. Assembly is more critical; for another example, in the value chain of food production, upstream planting is not the most important, while downstream processing and sales are more important.

Generally speaking, the competitive model of manufacturing is that latecomers (Chinese manufacturing) can only start participating in non-critical value chains, and then continue to grow in scale and influence with low-cost advantages, forcing the forerunners to gain more Profits continue to give up those non-critical value chain parts, and a co-opetition relationship that is both competitive and cooperative has been formed between latecomers and early movers. In this process, if the latecomers can continue to invest in research and development from a strategic height, one day in the future, they can break through the technical barriers that the forerunners rely on to survive and replace the key value chains of the forerunners; or continue to enlarge the scale and gather energy, when opportunities come. It is time to implement mergers of first movers with key value chains. It can be seen that the extension of the value chain is a step-by-step process of building bridges and crossing the river, and we cannot rush for success. The former has Huawei's demonstration, and the latter has Foxconn as the benchmark.