Chinese exporters dealing with rising costs

With rapidly rising costs and continuously strengthening local currency, Chinese exporters are under mounting pressure.

Most Chinese exhibitors interviewed at NPE2012 expect their export business to be at least stable,Proxense's advanced handsfreeaccess technology. and many optimistically forecast double-digit growth. They, however, tend to acknowledge the tougher conditions. Some smaller companies argue that the overall market conditions won’t necessarily hinder their growth, as long as their customers are doing well.

Others said the cost hikes are manageable – “the business is still profitable for now,” one said. But they chose to not go into details.

One mold maker, which asked to not be named, said “business is not looking good. It’s much worse this year than last year. ”

“We don’t really know why the business took a fall in the first quarter. But we are trying hard to turn it around,” added the first-time NPE exhibitor. It is hoping to get some business from less established markets in North America, which now only represents less than 10 percent of its business.

The lost cost advantage is taking some manufacturing away from mainland China. Taiwan;s Longzu Plastic Molding Co. Ltd. said it has witnessed Taiwan-based manufacturers across end-market sectors move production from the mainland back to Taiwan.Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings?

“I think the rising cost in China cause some factories to move operations to other developing countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia,” said Lee, the company’s director of marketing and business development of Americas.

“I personally think souring is just one step of the product cycle, and did not represent the whole picture of international trade,” he added.The beddinges sofa bed slipcover is a good ， The company helps U.S. companies find suppliers, customers, workers and either export or sell products domestically.

At the same time,At Blow mouldengineering we specialize in conceptual prototype design. China’s import demand is on the rise, partly because of the rising labor cost and currency exchange rate, said Alibaba U.S. General Manager Annie Xu. This is giving American businesses the opportunity to tap into the China market.

“Bell Performance, a maker of fuel and oil additives based in Florida, is a good example. They were at our meet up [at NPE] yesterday and I learned they have found their first distribution partner in China and are looking for more,” she said.

China has been pushing for the wider use of its currency, the Renminbi, for global trade and investment. But it has not yet made a strong impact for exporters. The vast majority of the trade is still based on U.S. dollars.

As recently reported by the Financial Times, Western Union Business Solutions surveyed 1,000 Chinese companies, and more than a third of them said they would prefer to be paid in their own local currency. Moreover, Western buyers could save up to 3 percent if they paid Chinese suppliers in renminbi.

“Our customers are well aware of the option of paying in renminbi, but they are not doing it,” said general manager Eric Zhang of Shenzhen-based King Tech Mould. “The Chinese currently is becoming more internalized, but not there yet.Where to buy or purchase plasticmoulds for precast and wetcast concrete?”

TV Adviser on Money Offers Card

For more than a decade, Suze Orman has exhorted her viewers on CNBC to spend less than they earn, flashed her blazing smile from the covers of best-selling books and endorsed the occasional auto loan provider and brokerage firm.

Never before, however, has she built a financial product from scratch and urged her considerable number of fans to use it frequently. That changes with the introduction on Monday of her Approved card, which works a lot like a bank debit card but does not come with a checking account. It is a prepaid debit card, and companies that offer similar cards have drawn criticism for sky-high fees and poor disclosure.

The hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, American Express and the Kardashian sisters are among those who have piled in with their own cards, and they are nearly ubiquitous at drugstores and other retailers. The target customers are most often people who have little credit history — or credit so bad that banks will not come near them.

Ms. Orman seeks to broaden the debit card market by charging low fees and offering new services, including unlimited access to credit reports. She has put more than $1 million of her own money into the venture and is prepared to add more, since the product may not break even right away. But her move also raises so many questions that it is hard to even know where to start.

How can the Approved card make money charging fees on par with those on Walmart’s cut-rate MoneyCard, while also paying a credit bureau for access to its services? Also, can it really be just fine with CNBC, where Ms. Orman has a weekly show, that her card will compete with products from companies she discusses frequently with viewers? And will her followers care that she is pushing purple pieces of plastic that will help her make money from their everyday spending?

“I couldn’t be more proud of this card if I tried,” she said. “And it doesn’t really matter what I say. It matters what happens when somebody uses this baby.”

Their choice to use it may be colored by the opportune moment in which Ms. Orman finds herself. Big banks have offended scores of consumers with new fees and account balance minimums. People seeking alternatives may well find what they are looking for in prepaid cards.

That might not have been the case several years ago, when most prepaid card issuers marketed them to teenagers, or as gifts, or to people with poor credit who needed a way to make online purchases or visit a merchant without wads of cash.

More recently, companies like Green Dot (a partner with Walmart) and NetSpend have emerged. They persuade consumers to buy the cards first, in part through their availability in 300,000 locations, including grocery and convenience stores, according to the Mercator Advisory Group. Then, they try to persuade people to reuse them. Services like direct deposit and online bill payment have helped some. Still, 43 percent of the cards are never reloaded or are reloaded only once, according to Mercator.

These cards differ from checking accounts in other ways. There is no checkbook, nor do they have their own network of A.T.M.’s, though some prepaid card issuers have agreements with networks to offer free withdrawals. And different regulators govern them, which can mean fewer consumer protections under certain circumstances.

The biggest difference from a regular bank account, however, is the fee structure on the debit cards. Prepaid-card holders must often pay to buy the card and put money on it. There is often a monthly fee. Bill paying, phone help — even making a purchase can cost a dollar or two.

Ms. Orman watched this unfold and vowed to build something better. Her fees for the Approved card for things like A.T.M. withdrawals are about as low as they come, though she was not able to fulfill her goal of avoiding a $3 monthly fee, which is deducted from the remaining balance.

Whether consumers could do better with a free checking account (and yes, plenty still exist) would depend on whether they value paper checks and in-person service. Financially, they would most likely do worse if they bounced those checks or used overdraft services and paid $20 or $30 for each transaction.

The Approved card, like most leading prepaid cards, generally does not let people spend more than they have.

But the most noteworthy part of the Approved card is Ms. Orman’s efforts to make her customers more aware of their credit histories. All users get unlimited access to their credit reports and credit scores from TransUnion, though not the more widely used FICO scores. They will also get free credit monitoring and identity theft protection.

The real question is whether any debit card can help a cardholder become more creditworthy. The three major credit bureaus — TransUnion, Equifax and Experian — generally do not use debit card spending data to determine whether someone is qualified for loans.

“There is something radically wrong here,” Ms. Orman said. “We are rewarding people for having credit and punishing people who pay in cash. I want to change that paradigm.”

So she has persuaded TransUnion to collect spending data from Approved card customers. Perhaps it will look at other companies’ data too. And in a few years, it will see whether there is any proof that prepaid debit users deserve recognition for good behavior.

Until then, this is mere vaporware. The data may prove meaningless, and even if there are patterns, TransUnion probably would not give people more than a handful of points’ worth of credit on their scores.

As for the free credit reports and such, TransUnion could raise the price Ms. Orman pays in 2013. TransUnion may simply be in this temporarily for the gold star it gets from siding with Ms. Orman and her people-first philosophy.

Mobile commerce: three trends to watch

These are heady days for futurists trying to predict the future of cash.

The meteoric rise of smartphones and growing confidence in e-commerce have led to a Klondike rush to devise new ways of extracting money from willing consumers’ wallets.

By most accounts, widespread adoption of the most high-tech of these visions – a world in which smartphones are waved at terminals instead of wallets – is a few years off.

Here’s a buzzword you’ll be hearing a lot more of in the years to come.

Before mobile payments, there are going to be all kinds of other mobile shopping activities. If e-commerce is the act of using digital technology to make a purchase, then pre-commerce is the catch-all term for all the digital shopping that happens before the customer gets to the register.

“Shopping is about to change substantially,” says Darrell MacMullin, managing director of Paypal Canada. “People are walking in off the road with a barcode scanner for price comparison.”

Some forms of pre-commerce are here already: UPC and QR-code scanning apps are a reality, and scannable codes are turning up everywhere from grocery stores to bookstores.

Consumers are already well-accustomed to using the Internet to compare products, something that’s only going to get conducted on the fly more frequently as mobile websites, apps, and hardware improve.

Geo-aware marketing – a long-promised idea – might soon arrive, sending offers to customers’ mobile devices as they walk past a storefront, or through a store’s front door. (Customers would probably have to download an app first; uptake of such a system would depend on their tolerance for digital flyers arriving on their doorstep.)

Similarly, customers might soon find themselves in control of detailed information about real-world inventory at retail outlets, without having to go in and ask. eBay Inc. acquired a hot startup named Milo that interfaces between companies’ inventory systems and the public-facing Internet, saving customers the hassle of phoning around for a product. (This would make a perfect app for an iPhone 4S, if you could figure out where to find one in stock.)

Not all the pieces of the new world of mobile payments at the cash register have landed yet. The industry is still shaking out, and technical standards haven’t been completely settled upon.

But that hasn’t stopped some firms from charging ahead. Starbucks Corp. is implementing a mobile system that does an end run around the digital wallet technology of the future. Starbucks uses an iPhone app to turn the mobile device into a virtual Starbucks card. Customers create an account and load it up with store credit; at the till, the app will display a barcode on the phone’s screen, which the cashier can scan with a barcode reader, debiting the customer’s account.

More elaborate technologies coming down the pipe will allow consumers to pay by tapping the phone to a reader device – but proprietary solutions like that of Starbucks could beat them to the punch

Companies like PayPal and Visa are taking a technology-agnostic approach to the future of mobile payments, working to build up platforms for e-commerce that can be used with whatever devices consumers end up toting five years down the line.

So while tap-to-pay solutions hog the limelight, they’re not the only ones in the offing.

For instance, PayPal is working on a system that will allow customers to show up at the till with no physical payment card at all – and simply offer a phone number and a personal access PIN, which the merchant can use to debit a PayPal account online using computer equipment they already have.

“Merchants love the idea, because they don’t have to do anything from a technology standpoint,” Mr. MacMullin says.

The widespread adoption of digital wallets might also lead to the spread of the kind of retail experience customers are already having at the Apple Store, in which purchases happen on the store floor and receipts are e-mailed instead of printed.

Digital wallets run by major entities like Visa, PayPal or Google would mean that it would become practical to centralize that experience through the payment provider to apply to all purchases, and not just those at a single, tech-savvy merchant.

But there is life beyond smartphones. The wallet-less future might be overstated, for the simple reason that smartphones go dead, and nobody wants to be out a wallet when their iPhone dies.

Lower-tech alternatives will persist, whether plastic or paper, or metal. Coinage has been around for at least two millennia. Smartphones won’t dispatch it quite yet.

Brownville home to governors, businessmen and at least one major rascal

The Brownville agency office was managed initially by John Carson, who also was president of the Lushbaugh & Carson Bank there.

The next year, gold was discovered in Colorado, with the Brownville steamboat landing becoming a trailhead for outfitting gold seekers, which greatly increasing the express company's business.

The increase brought competition in the form of  Merchant's Union Express Co., which was managed by Jacob K. Bear (sometimes Baer). When  Merchant's Express later closed, Carson stepped down from his position at U.S. Express, which then was assumed by Bear.

The next we hear from Bear is on June 13, 1867, when "J.K. Bear and 165 other citizens of Nemaha County" signed a petition concerning the bill removing the capital from Omaha.

Early in 1869, the Brownville newspaper carried a story saying that Bear "was found at a late hour of the night sweltering in his own blood and groaning in pain. After he had so far recovered as to tell the story, he told that he had been sandbagged, shot and robbed of several hundred dollars."

The money was from the freight office, but why he had it in his possession late in the evening and not in the bank was unclear. The freight company did buy a new safe for the office and offered a reward, but the supposed robber was not captured or even a suspect sought.

Many folks in Brownville were skeptical of Bear's account and at least felt the entire story was "rather fishy." Still, Bear kept his position.

On Friday Oct. 28, 1869, it was first reported that the express office had been robbed of $12,000 (or as much as $15,000) the previous day. Interestingly, Bear had paid off a $200 loan and all of his local debts that same day.

On Saturday morning Bear was gone, but he left a complete letter of explanation with the Brownville Democrat. In the note he stated that he had taken "about $12,000" and further instructed that the letter be shown to W.H. Quick, his supervisor, when he arrived from Des Moines. He told the paper that he was certain the express company would issue a large reward for his capture, but at least he left town owing no one anything.

He also predicted, quite accurately it turned out, that his odds of escaping were 99 to 1 against him. His only regret was that he was sorry for his wife, who immediately reacted by filing for divorce.

Division Superintendent Quick immediately had a poster printed offering a $2,000 reward -- $1,000 for Bear's capture and return to Brownville and $1,000 for the return of the money or a proportional amount for any recovery. Bear was described as 25 years old, 5-foot-9½, weighing about 140 pounds, with smooth skin of a dark complexion, black moustache and a scar on his neck "caused by a pistol ball."

On Sept. 14, Bear was indeed caught and indicted by a grand jury. He said he had chosen to flee over suicide and that as he jumped into a skiff to cross the river, the cash box with the rest of the money fell into the river. He also explained the self-inflicted wound to his neck was made by pulling a loose bunch of skin and shooting himself through it.

Bear was found guilty and sentenced to one year in the state penitentiary, far too lenient by local opinion.Interestingly and unexplainably, the governor subsequently reduced the sentence to three months.

On release, his wife remarried Bear saying "she would rather be ‘squz by a bear than not squz at all.'" Brownville citizens later claimed to have seen Bear around town, and a number of men even dug up the ground around his home looking for a cache of buried loot.

On Feb. 26, 1874, the Troy, Kan., Kansas Chief reported that J.K. Bear, alias A.J. Curtis of Waverly, Iowa, had absconded "with a pile of express money." Bear was said to be known to have a passion for gambling.

At his subsequent capture, the Waverly Independent reported that while he was working for the Illinois Central Railroad, Bear announced that he was "leaving for a few days" and again had left a confession letter admitting he had taken $1,100, that "gambling did the work," and that he would return and replace the money.

At that point Bear again disappeared somewhere far enough that no further account was forthcoming.

Gold & Silver Higher as Eurozone Downgrades

Gold and, particularly, silver are higher in European trading, especially in Japanese yen, which has come under pressure again today. The initial "repatriation funds" yen rally in the days after the natural and nuclear disaster has abated.

Gold is again close to record nominal highs in yen (119,000/oz) and other currencies. The outlook for the yen is not good due to massive fiscal and demographic challenges, zero percent interest rates and ongoing currency debasement – none of which will be helped by the nuclear disaster.

Risk appetite remains high with investors buying equities and shrugging off considerable geopolitical and sovereign debt risk. The downgrades of Portugal and Greece have led to new record high 10-year bond yields for both – at over 8.02% and 12.73% respectively.

Gold is supported at $1,410/oz and at $1,380/oz and €995/oz. A close above the record nominal high of $1,447.82/oz would likely see gold rise to psychological resistance of $1,500/oz in short order.


Gold in US Dollars - 17 February 2010 - 30 March 2011 (Tick)

Gold commenced 2011 at $1,420.78/oz and with two days of trading left in the first quarter, gold is marginally higher at $1,420/oz. It is therefore flat for the quarter after another quarter of correction and consolidation.

A lower quarterly close would be the first lower quarterly close in nine quarters. This may be beneficial to some of those short the gold market who may be attempting to "paint the tape" and engineer a lower quarterly close – in the forlorn hope that this could lead to momentum selling by trend, following hedge funds and traders.

A lower quarterly close may be achieved but the fundamentals of anemic supply and continuing strong demand both from the investment sector, but also from the jewelry and industrial sectors (dental and electronics primarily) internationally, and particularly in China and Asia in general will likely see gold continue to rise in 2011.

Gold in US Dollar - 1 January 2010 - 30 March 2011 (Daily)

Interestingly, March 2010 and the first quarter last year (see chart above), also saw gold flatline prior to strong gains in April and the second quarter of 2010 (Q2 10). Gold rose by nearly 6% last April and by nearly 12% in the quarter.

The unresolved eurozone debt crisis and the emergence of the Japanese natural and nuclear disasters and geopolitical risk in oil producing nations means that the fundamentals today are as sound as they were in 2010 – if not more sound.

Bearish predictions that higher gold prices would lead to sharp falls in industrial and jewelry demand are being proven wrong as seen in the figures released by the CPM group this morning (see news).