Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Flight of the Silicon Dargon, August 6, 2008
Every journalist dreams of writing a book and Silicon Dragon (McGraw- Hill, $24.95) is Rebecca Fannin's. She interviews a dozen of China's most successful entrepreneurs and builds a book around her profiles of their roads to success. These are some of China's movers and shakers in the high tech industry, especially in Internet and wireless communication sectors. All of them are well known inside China but most are relatively unknown to the West. By describing and analyzing the keys to their success, Fannin has provided some lessons learned that are useful to anyone contemplating doing business in China.
As readers go through the 150 pages of easy to read text, they find certain common themes. The first lesson is that a proven business model from the U.S. does not guarantee success in China. Whether it's Alibaba vs. eBay, Dangdang vs. Amazon or Baidu vs. Google, the local version has first mover advantage and can move quickly to localize the business model to ensure acceptance in China.
The established American competitors initially focused on their U.S. market and paid no attention to China. By the time they are ready for China, they attempt to leapfrog via acquisition of a local company. They then make the mistake of replacing the Chinese management team with culturally deaf and dumb managers from home or even move the headquarters back to the U.S. Thus they further handcuff themselves by removing the ability to react quickly to a fast changing market. The book offers many other gems on rules of conduct in China that readers will find useful.
Alas, the subtitle of this book: "How China is Winning the Tech Race" is unfortunately misleading. With the possible exception of the last chapter on possible technological breakthrough on light emitting diodes based on silicon, other chapters depict no threat of world leading edge, technical breakthroughs. Even the LED development with its vast potential to revolutionize the lighting of the world is at the pre-commercial stage. All the other chapters describe clever, hard working entrepreneurs that have basically improved upon something that already existed.
My personal view of where China will make a world leading edge, technology breakthrough is to look in life sciences and not in electronics. My reason is that China has been investing heavily in R&D. In such cases as stem cell therapy, researchers in China do not have the school of intelligent design as competitor for funding.
Regrettably, this book exhibits too much rush to publish and could have improved its quality with a bit of fact checking and editing. For example, the book says "China accounts for 24% of world production of semiconductors." This is not true. China accounts for 24% of consumption but barely produces one fifth of what they consume. Albert Yu is described as "now-retired programmer" at Intel. His actual last position was Senior Vice President in charge of Intel's microprocessor development. The two top foundries in Taiwan are identified as Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and United Microelectronics Corp. UMC is correct but the other, by far the largest and best known in the business is TSMC, where T stands for Taiwan.
Blemishes like those listed above, and there were others, are reasons why I deducted one star in my rating of otherwise an useful case study sort of business book.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
China's High-Tech Rise, from the Inside , February 21, 2008
Unlike some tomes about China that talk of the nation and its place amid the sweep of history, Rebecca Fannin does something I find more powerful: Using detailed tales of a dozen Chinese entrepreneurs to tell the story. Fannin sets the scene by telling of the impending rise of China, the increase in IPOs born there, the ballooning volume of venture capital investment, and as a fair-minded journalist also talks of the many challenges and potential pitfalls. While the experts she quotes say it will be 10-20 years before China ascends, one can taste that ascent through the creative business class she portrays -- whether a demure "Yu Yu," the creator of an Amazon.com wanna be, the head of the ever-present and powerful Alibaba.com B2B service site, or the engineer and accidental entrepreneur behind the Internet Explorer challenger known as Maxthon. She hints at who from the Middle Kingdom might be the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. She draws sometimes amusing parallels between today's China and Japan in its early days of economic ascendancy, and of Silicon Valley of the Web 1.0 boom days. Only occasionally, Fannin tips her hand, telling us, for example, that her bet is with Baidu rather than Google. But she also notes that while the search engine is growing, Google is learning quickly and will challenge.
Fannin (whom I know profesionally) also treads lightly -- some might say too lightly -- over sweeping issues that could have huge consequences, such as challenges from the West over intellectual property or copyright infringement, or the potential strains on the country being placed by a new moneyed entrepreneurial class along the coasts that's leaving peasants to the West out of this industrial revolution. But that may be an unfair complaint. The work Fannin has done in painting textured and sometimes colorful portraits of individuals, replete with relevant facts, figures, context and possible knocks on them, tells a story of a China that goes into more rich detail, and may tell us more, than we usually get.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Required Reading, August 18, 2008
Increasing numbers of Western observers, not to mention the Chinese themselves, are coming to realize that Chinese models of innovation and management may eventually drive competitive advantage beyond the home court. It's old news that China has the lead in manufacturing, but what about technology? More specifically, growing technology-based businesses to scale has been the trump card of the U.S. economy for decades. So why are Silicon Valley venture capitalists betting more each year on Chinese tech businesses? Rebecca Fannin's Silicon Dragons is a smoothly written, handy guide to the "who, what, when, where and why" of high profile Chinese tech companies, and an inside look at both the American investors who back them, and the role that American models, education, and capital continue to play in China's development. It's also required reading for anyone who needs to understand Chinese business culture, and why it fosters such nimble, ambitious and technically expert enterprises.
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