Hey:

anyone wants to talk about China? I am thinking that with all the manufacturing factories moved to China, there should be hugh potential market for thermography there. Does anyone have any information on it? or where can I find it?

Maybe a short answer is RED China. RED hot - not! I think they generally steal technology; buying is not their normal way of doing business.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing is also moving far east.

Our popular IR Camera, the MOBIR M4 is made in China. Their manufacturing capabilities and quality overall are improving rapidly - expect to see Auto exports from China to the US in the near future. Greatest number of millionaire's in the world are from China (yes I know it is a small % of their population), and their gov't is encouraging USA Chinese to invest in manufacturing opportunities in mainland China. While they definately copied a lot of technology in years past - they are committed to developing their own and being a major world economic player.
http://www.reliabilitydirect.com/tempproducts/M4.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_23/b3936033_mz011.htm

China's auto are a copy violation of US patents, so they'll be hard-pressed to get them here.

Do you remember how everyone used to laugh at those funny little Japanese cars in the 60s and 70s?

Sometime in the next 12 months, Toyota will take over GMs mantle as the world's largest car manufacturer?

OK, so the Chinese might not be able to get into the US market to start with - do you think they care? There's the rest of the world to deal with.

Go to any so called 3rd world country and you will find the majority of cars on the road are not US built?

And they learn quick - neither Toyota nor any Chinese manufacturer are going to get stuck with US$5k of the sticker price of each car going to fund employee health car benefits.

And, when they do get their auto industry up and running, do you really think that a little thing like breach of copyright protection will be allowed to stand in the way of Boeing trying to sell aircraft to China in the face of competition from Airbus or GE trying to sell power plants in competition with Japanese or Korean corporations?

Time to get your head out the sand (or worse places) amd recognise that China is going to be a real competitor

Echoing Dave and Buzz - the Chinese are getting much better at manufacturing and once they figure out the distribution system in the US and Canada, or partner with the right sales groups in North America - they will be a force to be reckoned with.

In addition, some of the American manufacturers are becoming arrogant as they currently sit in domination of this end of the market. That is usually a sure sign that they are at the end of their upward curve and will begin their downward curve journey soon.

One such company - who shall remain nameless -
contacted us to get a pre-conference attendance list from one of our events. When we informed them that we have a published privacy policy that prevented us from distributing the list – and they threatened to withhold advertising at Reliabilityweb.com, RELIABILITY Magazine and Uptime Magazine. In other words – if we did not violate our BBBOnline certified privacy policy we stood to loose lots of advertising dollars.

Large companies that are market leaders wield a tremendous amount of power in marketplaces. They like to control the flow of information to the market place – but that method is only effective if no one has a PC and the Internet!

Large companies are not necessarily the best influencers for market innovation. They seek to squash competition, control market communication with their own version of reality and lessen competition to keep prices higher. Smaller and much hungrier competitors work hard to provide a better product but alas our research shows that this maintenance and reliability market does not reward smaller and more innovative competitors. They buy on price alone or use the security of a large supplier as a pacifier. Large companies can take smaller margins and wait the innovators out. Look what happened in the vibration marketplace when large companies swallowed the smaller innovative suppliers. They turned a vibrant (no pun intended) market into a stagnant one in terms of innovation. Now they live off of software maintenance fees.

We told the company who tried to use ad dollars to violate our privacy policy to jump in a lake (our response was actually not that civil but you get the idea).

They don't seem to miss us and we don't miss them but we sure hope forum members will at least take a look at what smaller technical innovators (who do build American products as well) offer.

This country was built on rewarding innovation.

My 2 cents.

Terry O

Hi, Gens:

I appreciate all the replies (although most are not directly related to my topic).

I tried to do some my own research, and found out that there are 3 uncooled IR camera makers in China currently. They use bolometers (120X160) from France. On one of maker's website, they have a long list of customers, which mostly are in the electricity industry.

And most of the major US or european IR camera suppliers have office or representatives in China.

But it's hard to find any market analysis reports type stuff.