Customer Reviews

Chindia: How China and India Are Revolutionizing Global Business

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China manufacturing and India Information Technology are winning the world stage. With 2.3 billion customers, it is a major market to reckon with. The middle class is doing well in both countries.

Using IT as a base, outsourcing, call centers, e-leader in villages, ICICI bank micro finance to the millions of poor, computerized land record, tech innovation become the strength of India. Tata Consulting Services, Wipro, Infosys, Satyam are becoming household names. Tata Motor learned much from Toyota Motor. Indian Institute Technology and Manipal Inst Technology (the other MIT) are just a few of the hundreds of world-class institutions that turned out the best and the brightest students in India. They work on Wall Street, Silicon Valley and become CEOs of their own firms. Problems? Too many people with few teachers in India. Teacher salary is very low and curriculum needs overhaul. Most Indians earn $1 per day. Foreign direct investment (FDI) in India is only $6 bn USD.

For China, FDI is $60 bn USD in 2006. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao took over 2003. With foreign reserve almost $1 trillion USD, China buys everything from everyone. Veolia Environment (a French firm) invested $800 million in 10 water-treatment projects and profited well. Proctor and Gamble did wel with 4 factories. Cummins Engine found the niche. Autos: VW is now only 25%, GM is less, difficult to compete with Honda, Hyundai, local brand Chery. Steel, chemical, TV, cell phones, PC, DVD, the list goes on and on. In each one of these areas, there is always Chinese competition. TCL is winning the TV war vs Sony, Panasonic and Samsung. Motorola competes with Nokia and many other locals. Oil business, PetroChina, China National Petroleum Corp, and CNOOC are all owned by the Chinese government. 200 large state companies control oil, gas, telecom, steel, coal, and many other core industries. As more US banks buy shares of the China banks, the growth potential is unlimited. But it also comes with many debt transparency issues.

Historically, India and China never worked together. If they do, I believe it is mutually beneficial. Indians learned from the British with strong IT and finance experience. Chinese are operational and manufacturing experts. That day may come very soon.

In each chapter, it moves back and forth from China to India, making it difficult to flow. This book will be better if it explains one country at a time. Still, the book is very informative and I will recommend this book to all CEOs.

This book provides a look at the growth of the economies of China and India. The book looks at what is going right in both countries and also looks at the big problems facing them (think: poor education, unequal distribution of wealth, government corruption, intellectual property theft, etc.).

In places the book is rather gloomy, particuarly when talking about the loss of jobs in the United States to these countries. In other spots, the book hits the weaknesses of these economic powerhouses right on the head.

The book often gives personal stories of people in these countries who have seen their lives changed by the economic growth of India and China, and many of these stories are fascinating and even touching. All in all, this is a book that is well worth reading.

Although the editor is well meaning in publishing a number of Business Week articles in a single book on India and China, I feel that the chapters lacked deapth. Writing an article for a magazine is very different to writing a chapter of a book and Chindia suffers because it is just a collection of articles. Newspaper & magazine journalists are required to have very different skill sets than book writers and I have yet to find a book written by a journalist that is not shallow and repetitive. I would have expected the bibliography to be a reference to other serious texts and articles on the subject, instead it is a list only of Buisness Week articles on the same subject, whether they are the same articles collected in the book I do not know, but the bibliography shows loyalty to Business Week, not helpfulness to the reader in understanding a complex topic. Chindia is a classic example of a shallow and repetitive book published by a journalist.

China and India are both vast, dynamic countries. The pace of their progress is furious and they are earmarked to become "the planet's next economic superpowers." Many commentators on Asia fall into the trap of a stereotype, as if they are classifying China and India together under one broad title - "Chindia." However, China and India are starkly different nations, as highlighted in this book edited by Pete Engardio. For readers unfamiliar with either country, this text provides an easy-to-read introduction. It revisits some of the most common facts and fallacies about economic and business life in both states. getAbstract recommends this well-written, well-edited retrospective archive of BusinessWeek articles as an excellent historic source for anyone interested in China and India's economic emergence during the past several years.

Not a bad book for someone with very little knowledge of India or China. However most of the data is somewhat old and thea reader is better advised to read some of the more recent books on the subject