Information/Technology - 19. page

Well-known Chinese news site Sina (NASDAQ: SINA) recently reported that a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck off the coast of Fukushima, Japan. The earthquake also shut down some factories, including chip maker Renesas Electronics. This tragedy in Japan once again casts a shadow over the auto industry, which is suffering from chip supply bottlenecks and rising raw material prices. A total of three Renesas factories were affected. One of them is an important chip production base for Renesas, and automotive chips account for about two-thirds of the products it produces. The earthquake also affected Japanese car companies such as Toyota and Nissan. Renesas is the world’s third largest automotive chip maker and the world’s largest manufacturer of microcontrollers (MCUs), accounting for about 19 percent of the global market. In addition to Toyota, Nissan, Ford, Great Wall Motors and other automakers are also customers of Renesas Electronics. Many automobile companies are planning to raise prices. Since 2020, the global auto industry has been plagued by chip shortages. According to Auto Forecast Solutions (AFS) data, due to the shortage of automotive chip supplies, the global automobile production volume was reduced by 11.31 million vehicles in 2021, a drop of 14.6 percent, of which the Chinese vendors reduced production by 2.148 million vehicles in 2021. According to the latest forecast from AFS, global automakers may cut production by more than 1 million vehicles in 2022 due to chip shortages. In this context, chip prices have also risen. The shipment cycle of chips is also much longer than before the pandemic. China’s auto production and sales account for about 33 percent of the global market, but auto semiconductors and other components mainly rely on overseas suppliers.

Source: Sina, March 18, 2022
https://news.sina.com.cn/s/2022-03-18/doc-imcwipih9278428.shtml

On March 15, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), China’s top cyber regulator, directed its office overseeing the city of Beijing to send a team to Douban to “supervise its rectification and reform.”

Douban is an interest-based networking site in China that lets users form online communities and review films, books and music. At the end of last year, the head of the CAC had already met with the person in charge and chief editor of Douban.com, as there were “repeated appearances of information prohibited by laws and regulations being published or transmitted on Douban.com and its accounts.”The  CAC ordered Douban “immediately to rectify and seriously deal with the persons responsible” in accordance to the Cybersecurity Law. The CAC’s office in Beijing imposed administrative penalties totaling 1.5 million yuan (US$ 0.24 million) in fines on Beijing Douwang Technology Co., the main operator of Douban.com.

In fact, this is not the first time that the CAC punished Douban. From January to November 2021, the CAC directed its office in Beijing to impose 20 penalties on Douban, for a total cumulative fine of 9 million yuan (US$ 1.4 million).

Source: China.com.cn, March 15, 2022
http://tech.china.com.cn/app/20220315/385795.shtml

China is the world’s largest production base and consumer market in the field of industrial robots, but it has almost no pricing rights. The reason is that its key technologies are in the hands of other countries.  

At the end of 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China said that China has been the world’s largest consumer of industrial robots for the last eight consecutive years. The density of robots in manufacturing reached 246 per 10,000 people in 2020. That is nearly twice the global average.  

To carry out each motion a robot makes, it needs a core controller, a servo driver and a servo motor to work together. The core controller is the “brain” of the industrial robot, which directly affects the stability and accuracy of the machine.

The Chinese financial media, Chinese Business Strategies, said in a commentary article in February of this year that the biggest reason that China-made robots are inferior to those of other countries is the “algorithm gap” in the core controller system, which is not only reflected in the core controller, but also slows down the response speed of the servo system. 

Last June, a Chinese Academic Group, The Automation Committee, published an op-ed article, “A Panoramic Analysis of the Industrial Robot Industry Chain.” The article said that the high-end market is also mainly monopolized by international companies. Imported products account for more than 70 percent of China’s industrial robot servo market. A total of 85 percent of the precision reducers necessary for manufacturing industrial robots in China are also manufactured by foreign investors. These are mainly from Japan, Europe and the United States. Therefore, China has almost no pricing power in the field of industrial robots. 

China-made industrial robots are reluctantly used to produce those products with low precision requirements. High-end fields such as aerospace and the military industry have to rely on imported robots. The failure rate of Chinese-made robots is possibly several times higher than the failure rate of imported machines. Chinese companies would rather buy second-hand products from other countries at a high price than buy low-priced Chinese products.  

Source: Epoch Times, Feb. 27, 2022
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/2/27/n13608785.htm 

On February 4, a Chinese netizen posted a picture taken at the “Beijing Winter Olympics reception lobby.”

The picture was of a notice board with a blue background, with a large Wifi logo above and six smaller icons, each representing YouTube, Google Chrome, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Telegram. The six applications are banned in China and ordinary Chinese Internet users cannot access them .

This posting was deleted two hours after it had been posted. At present, a number of netizens have also been blocked from resending the picture.

According to Beijing News, a newspaper based in Beijing, there are 82 “official reception hotels” for the Beijing Winter Olympics, located in Beijing, Yanqing and Zhangjiakou. These official hotels are responsible for hosting the International Olympics Committee and the International Paralympic Committee families, international sports federations, national and regional Olympic and Paralympic committees, the press and other media, and other stakeholders.

Yu Debin, the head of the Games Service Department of the Beijing Organizing Committee, told Beijing News that these officially designated hotels will “launch overseas satellite channels in accordance with the law, with a good 5G network and barrier-free network transformation.”

Source: China Digital Times, February 4, 2022

【图说天朝】依法翻墙：北京冬奥会的“特供网络”