Sony Electronics, Marks & Spencer, Metro, Home Depot, Best Buy, Revlon, and L’Oreal – some of the big names to have closed Chinese operations
US-based Seagate, the world’s biggest maker of hard disk drives, closed its factory in Suzhou near Shanghai last month with the loss of 2,000 jobs, in a move that has rekindled fears that China is becoming increasingly hostile towards foreign firms operating in the country.
A passionate speech presented by Chinese president Xi Jinping at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in early January had been hoped to address the issue, and reassure investors that China’s remained open to foreign investment.
Xi defended globalisation and promised improved market access for foreign companies, a positive sign seen by many that China is still sticking firmly to its opening up policies, first rolled out by late leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s.
Yet, Seagate joined a spate of foreign companies to shutter operations in China in recent years, for various reasons, but most have attributed the country’s high tax regime, rising labour costs and fierce competition from domestic companies.
Panasonic, for instance, stopped all its manufacturing of televisions in the country in 2015 after 37 years of operating in China.
We are pleased to invite you to attend the third global independent research conference which will take place on March 9, 2017 at 1 Wimpole Street in London.
As Commodity Intelligence is taking part in the commodities panel, we have been given some free tickets for buy-side firms which we would like to share with you.
NOAA’s 2015 ‘Pausebuster’ paper was based on two new temperature sets of data – one containing measurements of temperatures at the planet’s surface on land, the other at the surface of the seas.
Both datasets were flawed. This newspaper has learnt that NOAA has now decided that the sea dataset will have to be replaced and substantially revised just 18 months after it was issued, because it used unreliable methods which overstated the speed of warming. The revised data will show both lower temperatures and a slower rate in the recent warming trend.
The land temperature dataset used by the study was afflicted by devastating bugs in its software that rendered its findings ‘unstable’.
The paper relied on a preliminary, ‘alpha’ version of the data which was never approved or verified.
A final, approved version has still not been issued. None of the data on which the paper was based was properly ‘archived’ – a mandatory requirement meant to ensure that raw data and the software used to process it is accessible to other scientists, so they can verify NOAA results.
Dr Bates retired from NOAA at the end of last year after a 40-year career in meteorology and climate science. As recently as 2014, the Obama administration awarded him a special gold medal for his work in setting new, supposedly binding standards ‘to produce and preserve climate data records’.
Yet when it came to the paper timed to influence the Paris conference, Dr Bates said, these standards were flagrantly ignored.
The idea — championed by Republican leaders and now under fresh consideration at the White House — includes a “border-adjustment” provision: taxes raised on imports and waived on exports. Commodity traders have been handicapping whether that will happen, and whether it gets applied to oil.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs Group earlier this week gave such a proposal a 20% chance of passing. But the fact this is even possible makes it worth outlining how dramatic all the changes would be.
If it passes, the change will be transformative. It would jolt U.S. oil prices up 25% compared to international prices, Goldman said Tuesday. U.S. oil would flip from a $2.50 discount to international oil today to become $10 more expensive. That would drive up U.S. production and refiners would likely buy more of that oil, then pass higher prices directly on to consumers. Drivers would pay an extra 30 cents a gallon at the pump.
Putting solar panels on rooftops and arrays is a labor-intensive process. You need people to design and manufacture the panels. Then people to market the panels to homes, businesses, and utilities. Then people to come and install them.
It all adds up to a lot of jobs. Even though solar power still provides just a fraction of America’s electricity — about 1.3 percent — the industry now employs more than 260,000 people, according to a new survey from the nonprofit Solar Foundation. And it’s growing fast: Last year, the solar industry accounted for one of every 50 new jobs nationwide.
The chart below breaks it down by job type. The majority of solar jobs are in installation, with a median wage of $25.96 per hour. The residential market, which is the most labor-intensive, accounts for 41 percent of employment, the commercial market 28 percent, and the utility-scale market the rest:
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(The Solar Foundation)To put this all in perspective: “Solar employs slightly more workers than natural gas, over twice as many as coal, over three times that of wind energy, and almost five times the number employed in nuclear energy,” the report notes. “Only oil/petroleum has more employment (by 38%) than solar.”
Now, mind you, comparing solar and coal is a bit unfair. Solar is growing fast from a tiny base, which means there's a lot of installation work to be done right now, whereas no one is building new coal plants in the US anymore. (Quite the contrary: Many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules and cheap natural gas.) So solar is in a particularly labor-intensive phase at the moment. Still, it’s worth thinking through what these numbers mean.
