Taxes cut in effort to lift exports
June 23, 2009
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China’s trade surplus down 9.6% in Jan.-July period
August 12, 2008
– China’s trade surplus fell to 123.72 billion U.S. dollars in the first seven months, down 13.1 billion U.S. dollars, or 9.6 percent year on year, the General Administration of Customs said on Monday.
Analysts said the fall was partly a result of China’s policies to tame surplus, but was also because of the rising prices of energy.
The European Union (EU) continued to be the country’s biggest trading partner, with two-way trade totaling 243.14 billion U.S. dollars, up 27.9 percent from January to July.
Exports to the EU rose 27.1 percent to 165.04 billion U.S. dollars, while imports grew 29.8 percent to 78.1 billion U.S. dollars, leaving a trade surplus of 86.94 billion U.S. dollars, up 24.9 percent year on year. The surplus growth, however, had decreased 29 percentage points.
Exports to the United States, the country’s second biggest trade partner, grew 9.9 percent to 140.39 billion U.S. dollars with a trade surplus of 91.67 billion U.S. dollars, up 3.8 percent year on year. The surplus growth, however, also declined by 15 percentage points.
Japan remained China’s No. 3 trade partner with bilateral trade totaling 154.93 billion U.S. dollars, up 19.2 percent.
Jan.-July trade exports to Japan reached 65.48 billion U.S. dollars, up 15.9 percent, while imports totaled 89.45 billion U.S. dollars, up 21.6 percent. This created a trade deficit of 23.98 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of 7 billion U.S. dollars over the same period of last year.
The administration said the average prices of primary products imports had soared. The country’s imports grew drastically by 70.6percent to 221.65 billion U.S. dollars in the first seven months, 32.6 percent of the total imports in the same period.
China imported 24.94 million tons of coal during the seven months with its average price jumping 51.9 percent to 70 U.S. dollars per tonnage. Imported soy bean grew to 20.73 million tons with its average prices up 78 percent to 591.70 U.S. dollars per ton.
Source: Xinhua
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China’s Wind Power Industry
July 20, 2008
Article by Lou Schwartz and Ryan Hodum
When 2007 ended, China’s installed base of wind power totaled just over 6 gigawatts (GW), earning the country fifth place among the world’s largest wind energy producers (after Germany, the U.S., Spain and India), up from sixth place in 2006. Wind power industry statistics show that by the end of 2008, China’s total installed base of wind power production will have reached 10 GW; some experts are estimating that by 2010, the total installed capacity for wind power generation in China will reach 20 GW and that by 2020 China’s installed base of wind power will total 100 GW (current global wind installation is 94 GW).
In 2007 an estimated 24 billion Yuan [approximately US $3.28 billion] was invested in China’s wind energy sector. Not surprisingly, this level of investment has spawned an industry — local manufacturers are responding by producing the equipment and components that the wind energy industry requires to sustain this growth.
It is conservatively estimated that between 2006 and 2015, 100 billion Yuan [US $14.5 billion] will be spent on equipment and component purchases to further develop China’s wind power industry. According to the Ministry of Commerce, by the end of 2006 there were more than 100 Chinese companies manufacturing equipment and components for the wind industry.
Foreign wind power equipment manufacturers, including the most significant international wind turbine manufacturers, Vestas, Suzlon, Gamesa, Nordex Corp., Honiton Energy Ltd. and GE Energy, have aggressively engaged this market. Though foreign wind turbine manufacturers’ share of the market has declined from nearly 75% a few years ago to 55% now, the foreign presence in China’s wind industry remains significant.
Foreign wind power equipment manufacturers have made strategic investments in China, allowing them to remain dominant even as indigenous Chinese wind equipment capabilities grow. At EU €60 million, Gamesa’s factory in Tianjin, which manufactures wind turbines, is the Spanish company’s second largest foreign investment (after the United States).
Also located in Tianjin is Vestas’ Wind Turbine Equipment (China) Co. Ltd., which manufactures blades and does wind turbine assembly.
Nordex has located two of its three manufacturing centers in China and has established the company’s Asia headquarters in Beijing. In the next three years, Nordex expects to invest an additional 500 million Yuan [approx. US $71 million ] to grow its business in China four-fold. GE Energy’s Shenyang wind turbine plant produces 1.5-MW-class wind turbines.
Localization of Equipment Manufacturing
To help spur the development of an indigenous wind power equipment and components industry, Beijing has mandated that all new wind power projects have at least a 70% Chinese component. Wind power equipment manufacturers also now enjoy a 50% discount on value added taxes (VAT) payable in China.
On April 23, 2008 the Ministry of Finance announced two changes to import tariff regulations with respect to the wind power industry, further spurring development of Chinese wind power equipment manufacturing. The first change, effective January 1, 2008, implemented a tariff and VAT rebate program for imports of parts and raw materials used in the manufacture of wind turbines. This change was significant because a large percentage of parts and raw materials used in the manufacture of wind turbines still must be sourced from outside of China.
The second tariff change, effective May 1, 2008, eliminated the tariff-free importation of wind turbines less than 2.5 MW. This tariff change is a strong indicator that the Chinese wind turbine industry is maturing rapidly; as recently as late 2007 Chinese wind power equipment was incapable of producing megawatt-class wind turbines.
Megawatt-class turbines are increasingly produced domestically and the elimination of tariff-free imports of wind turbines less than 2.5 MW in size will give added impetus to the domestic production of increasingly large wind turbines.
The economics of the wind power equipment industry are quite favorable. At present the cost of construction of wind power in China is approximately 8000-9000 Yuan/Kw [US $1170-1315 /kw] and 60% to 70% of those costs are equipment purchases. Because many of the most important Chinese wind power equipment and components companies have grown out of large industrial companies (including several public companies), there appears to be sufficient financial strength for these companies to grow.
Funds to finance new wind power equipment and component manufacturing in China have come primarily in the form of commercial bank loans, retained earnings and equity investments.
Turbines
According to Steve Sawyer, secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council, by 2009 China will become the world’s largest producer of wind turbines. At present China has at least 40 wind-power turbine manufacturers: 17 are state-owned or state-controlled companies, 12 are private Chinese companies, 7 are joint-venture companies and 4 are wholly foreign-owned companies.
Though China has yet to export wind turbines, China’s two largest wind turbine manufacturers — Xinjiang Jinfeng (Goldwind, whose December 2007 initial public offering (IPO) was the first pure-play wind power equipment Chinese stock offering in the U.S.) and Sinovel — have plans to export in 2009 and 2010.
Many of the largest wind turbine and other equipment manufacturers have licensed technology from western companies, including from AMSC Windtec, REpower, Aerodyn, Vensys and Garrad Hassan. Most of the largest Chinese wind turbine manufacturers have begun to produce 1.5-MW wind turbines and gradually these Chinese wind turbine manufacturers, having purchased designs for 2-, 3- and 5-MW wind turbines, are developing prototypes of larger wind turbines.
Bearings
The Chinese wind power industry continues to depend on imports for its supply of bearings. However, this dependence may be short lived. On December 11, 2007, the Timken Company entered into a joint venture agreement with the Xiangtan Electric Manufacturing Co., Ltd. to manufacture ultra-large bore bearings for the main rotor shafts of megawatt-class wind turbines. The bearings will be manufactured in China with some of the bearing materials and components coming from the U.S. The new US $38 million plant, which will be located in Hunan Province, will begin construction in 2008. Timken will have an 80% interest in the new venture.
Blades
The largest wind turbine blades to be manufactured in China to date (measuring 40.25 meters long) are now being manufactured by the China Materials Science and Technology Wind Power Blades Joint Stock Co. Ltd., [Read more]
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ANPR – Number Plate Recognition Technology
July 16, 2008
Recent advances in Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technologies have lead to a greater acceptance of the technology by car-park operators. The new digital ANPR technologies present greater read rates than traditional CCTV/PC based technologies and offer far greater flexibility in deployment and customization than previously available.
By attaching a unique signature to every vehicle entering and exiting a car park the potential of a car-park management system is greatly enhanced. The signature widely used by vehicle identification technologies is usually the registration number displayed on the front and rear of the vehicle. To robustly read this plate in all weather conditions, day and night and to increase the ability of a system to read dirty plates, Alpha Vision Design has developed a stand alone digital ANPR station that can extract the registration number and automatically present the number for processing.
The applications of ANPR technologies can be used for tolling, police enforcement, journey time analysis, average speed violation and access control. Within the car parking domain, most car park operators use ANPR technology as a medium to locate lost vehicles, to calculate occupancy times and to dramatically decrease the revenue loss associated with ticket fraud.
ANPR is also finding favour within non-supervised car parks as a means to control access via a white list. This white list contains a list of vehicles with known access rights. Suitable for hotel, apartment and company car parks, this negates the use of disposable paper tickets and wireless FOBs. Companies with large fleets are introducing ANPR as a cost effective method of tracking their vehicles throughout their depots. Large supermarkets and chains are also beginning to utilize the information obtained from their car-parks as a way of highlighting demographic patterns with a view to maximizing profits.
For any traffic management system to be a success, the read rate must exceed 99%. Traditionally most operators shied away from ANPR when they discovered that their true read rates were rarely above 60%. In real world applications, this was the limit, not due to poor software but the result of using conventional CCTV systems to obtain the images. CCTV technology is 50 years old and does not lend itself well to computer recognition systems.
The common processing core for CCTV based ANPR systems is a PC. CCTV/PC based systems are not robust and are unacceptably high maintenance. To counter this, Alpha Vision Design has developed a self-contained ANPR system designed specifically for the car parking industry. This system includes an integrated illuminator, high resolution digital camera, digital analyser and on-board relays, all contained in one standard security housing. Only mounting and a power cable is required – an industry first!
A high resolution camera obtains images that are over sixteen times larger in area size than CCTV images. Combined with a wider field of view, now only one camera is required to capture both the registration plate and an overview of the vehicle, and vehicle placement within a lane is no longer an issue which leads to greater capture rates.
The camera /computer unit can in real time adjust the exposure, gain, and the integrated on-board IR lighting to maximise the contrast and readability of the registration plate, including dirty plates, variations in plate reflectivity, strong headlamps and adverse weather conditions. This cannot be done with CCTV/PC based ANPR systems.
The setup is easy and is only required once per site, with no re-configuration necessary even after a power outage as the system will reboot automatically. On a typical 800 bay car-park, the system can also store up to five years of data, capturing and time stamping an image of every vehicle entering and exiting the facility. The system is true Plug & Play and can directly control a parking barrier via its on-board database and integrated relays. For configuration, simply use any standard web browser to manage the ANPR station – no third party software is required to manage the entire ANPR network.
Our standard systems are shipped in three versions. We have an ANPR station designed for operating at a 10 meter and 25 meter range, and a system for high speed traffic applications. All systems are pre configured and only mounting is required. The ANPR stations can act stand alone or integrate with an existing parking entry ticket/gate system. For remote applications, the ANPR station can also be configured to run over GPRS, TCP/IP and WIFI Networks.
Source: Â Â Â Â Â http://www.parkingireland.ie
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New Online Car Park Reservation System
July 16, 2008
A dream has now become true also at Berlin-Schönefeld: Going by car to the airport, no stress of looking for a parking lot, a beneficial price, and a short distance to the departure terminal.
Like for the airline companies, where by booking in time you automatically get a chance for a fair-priced ticket, you will now have a possibility to use a beneficial car park in close vicinity to the terminal, by early reservation / booking.
On 1st July 2008, the online car park reservation system has commenced its start-up on the website of Berlins airports, in cooperation with APCOA.
The passenger can now comfortably book a parking lot via Internet on the car parks P1 and P6 as well as in the multi-storey car park P4 of the airport Berlin-Schönefeld and pay in advance. Reservation systems have been used by Scheidt & Bachmann also on other airports like Stuttgart Airport (Germany), Boston Logan Airport (USA) etc. but this new reservation system is more strictly dividing functioning and free design capacity. It is embedded in the own homepage.
Straightforward in dependence on the reservation time and advance booking time, a discount computer integrated in the system guarantees a fair price to the final customer.
During paying in the online portal by credit card, ec/Maestro card or by the PayPal method, the passenger also selects his access medium (credit card or ec/Maestro card). Entry and exit are performed without the ticket by the access medium selected. Paying at the automatic pay station is omitted because the customer gets the voucher on the parking fee posted by E-mail, thanks to the reservation system. All relevant information details such as parking time, parking lot, etc. are derived from the reservation confirmation. The availability of a free parking lot will be ensured by the reservation allotment integrated in the parking system. This is the reason that it may happen that the car park gets the occupation status Full although there might be vacant parking lot. These vacant lots are provided for the reservations.
This shows that early reservation has benefits only: fair prices, attractive offers, no stress of car park search, and a guaranteed vacant parking lot. All of these functions are available to the operator, without any further manual adaptation or acceptance of reservations by phone or fax.
What is the technical method to realize online reservation? By selection of the reservation period, a request is directed to the server of the parking system at the Airport Berlin-Schönefeld, where the basic tariff stored in the system is determined. For every parking period desired, it is possible to leave a certain discount product, which depending on contingency and in consideration of the reservation period, the time of reservation and number of reservations of the customer determines the individual tariff. This reservation system is a platform for car park booking at all locations connected. A special feature of this online system is the freedom of web design. Via the SOAP server interface, the reservation system has been integrated directly into the customers own web site. As there are no other windows opening in the browser, the functioning capacities of advertising banners will be maintained. This reservation feature can be perfectly integrated into the web sites of cooperating partners, as e.g. travel agencies. Additional special conditions can be awarded to these partners via the discount module.
In the back end, the management of the online payment portals is also supplemented by the administration of all reservation master data, as well as all reservations existing in the system. Apart from this, the allotment can be controlled on-site, and the difference counting integrated in the system regularly considers all reservations left in the system, via the dynamic parking lot control. By means of the contingency control it can be determined how many parking lots shall be reserved for future reservations. Thereby limited temporary campaigns to utilize free capacities can be planned and performed via the discount module.
Source:Â Â Â Â http://www.parking-net.com
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