The recent links from rosadeng has been most valuable and I hope mightylakers was successful in inviting rosadeng to join SI. Some of those translations were top notch.
This post that you linked, however, raised a lot of questions. The following are my thoughts in response to his (her) post, paragraph by paragraph.
1) I wonder how much, regarding China, would we hear from the CC on Thursday. I hope I am wrong but even if QC is privileged to MII/Unicom's game plan and time table, I doubted if Q would be authorized to release them on an earnings CC. No doubt someone would ask IMJ the status of China. My guess is that IMJ will once again give one of ambiguous greenspanish statements about how optimistic he is.
2) As for complaints from a ZTE executive, same would hold true for any executive from Datang, Xing, QC, Ericy, Nokia etc. It is a waiting game right now and everyone is frustrated. So what is the point? I think these complaints shed no light to the China situation.
3) I have the most disagreement with Rosadeng's point about Q's IPR being a bigger road block than WTO. China has very little bargaining power when it comes to trade relationships with the western world. The yearly uncertainty of MFN removal has now been removed. WTO membership would further reduce the rhetoric they face from dealing with the West. Unlike Korea, I have not read anything that would indicate that China is using Q's royalty rate as a bargaining chip.
4) Chippac is just a packaging company, not yet a fab. Am I right?
chippac.com
5) Back to WTO again. While CSCO, HP, Inel are all US companies, they do not represent the US in the same manner that a Boeing or QC does. Just like one of the articles implied, China could be the swing vote which decides who wins the cdma2000 vs wCDMA war. Unfortunately, China and US WTO talks have broken down over some agricultural issues. The original target voting date of April is now postponed again indefinitely. I feel very comfortable in saying that IF the Bush administration started bashing China, we will see negative news coming for the unicom cdma launches, not to mention cancellation of a few 747s in favor of the AirBus.
6) Finally, regarding political pressure from the domestic GSM camp, I think we should look at what China Unicom, China Mobile etc have been doing. While it may be true that GSM market share has been improving for the Chinese domestic manufacturers, what are we really talking about, handsets???? It appears all the big upgrade contracts are still going to MOT, ERICY etc, but not the Datangs. I doubted if China is willing to risk handing over the upgrading of existing networks from foreign to domestic manufactures. The big question is next generation GSM to wCDMA. How much domestic capability does China have to corner a big chunk of the market vs the potential that cdma offers Unicom now?
Therefore, even though I am forever chicken little, I think sound business decision favors the qc camp.
Ramsey
ps the above are just my opinion. I do not have anything other than simple common sense to substantiate many of the points above and would like to hear conflicting opinions. |
