Investing In China
On 22 February, EMITA, the East Midlands International Trade Association, is holding an event called Opportunities for UK Businesses in China’s Regional Cities. It is organised in partnership with the China-Britain Business Council (CBBC) and UKTI.
Many British businesses continue to focus only in a small number of places in China, such as Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen. However, markets in these locations are becoming increasingly competitive.
The report – Opportunities for UK Businesses in China’s Regional Cities – presents the findings of research conducted in 2011, by CBBC and the Centre of International Business at the University of Leeds for and on behalf ofUKTI.
The key findings are that since 2007, exports to China from the East Midlands have risen from £267m to £424m. The main sector is machinery and transport equipment, which has grown by 58% since 2007.
The East Midlands group has identified two priority locations to develop business with China –Sichuan Province / Chongqing Municipality (which is twinned with Leicester) and Zhejiang Province / Ningbo. Even if Mandarin is the lingua franca, the inhabitants of Zhejiang speak Wu, a branch of Chinese, but the Wu dialects are very diverse, especially in the south, where one valley may speak a dialect completely unintelligible to another valley a few kilometres away. The main language of the Sichuan province is Sichuanese, a branch of Southwestern Mandarin, which is highly divergent in phonology, vocabulary and even grammar from the standard language.
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High-Speed Optical Wireless
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In one of the latest issues of The Economist, there was an interesting article about high-speed optical wireless. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a few smartphones from Casio were presented. Their new feature is that they can exchange data and transmit digital signals by varying the intensity of the light given off their screens. These variations are imperceptible to the human eye, but the camera on another phone can detect it at a distance of up to ten metres. It seems a bit like going back to signal lamps and Morse code, doesn’t it? It’s actually the beginning of a fast and cheap wireless-communication system called Li-Fi. |
Last October, the Li-Fi Consortium was formed. It is an industry group open to any company or organisation focused on the development and market introduction of optical wireless communication technology. Radio-based wireless is workable, the problem is that, with an ever increasing number of devices connected, only a limited amount of radio spectrum is available. Li-Fi offers the opportunity to exploit illumination, a completely different part of the electromagnetic spectrum which can be found almost everywhere.
Bulbs and tubes are not really suitable for modulation, but they are being replaced by LEDs, which are semiconductor devices. Producing flickering signals with their electronics is easy, according to Gordon Povey, who is working on light communication with Harald Haas and his colleagues at the University of Edinburgh.
The LEDs involved in Li-Fi would need photodetectors to receive data, but even if LEDs are not modified, hybrid systems are possible. For example, data could be downloaded using light but uploaded using radio. Moreover, light can also be used in areas which contain sensitive equipment that radio signals might interfere with, such as in aircraft and operating theatres.