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From QUORA:
Twenty years ago, when China was building the subway, they needed tunnel boring machines (TBMs), all of which were imported from Germany.
A tunnel boring machine from Germany cost 350 million RMB—not a penny less. At the time of purchase, strict conditions had to be signed: if the machine broke down, only German engineers could repair it.
A German engineer's daily wage to come to China was 3,000 euros, which was more than 30,000 RMB in those days. They were paid first-class travel and put up in the presidential suite of a five-star hotel.
No Chinese were allowed to see the repairs; everyone had to leave. When the work was finished, they would hand over the bill straight away—it cost 100,000 RMB to replace a small sealing ring.
Sometimes a minor error would lead to a three-month wait for a German engineer to arrive, resulting in hundreds of workers on the entire construction site sitting idle and millions of RMB in losses every day.
But by 2008, China's first tunnel boring machine with independent intellectual property rights had begun production. The Germans didn't bother with this at all; they thought that whatever the Chinese made would be useless and would be destroyed within a few days.
In the end, China's tunnel boring machines were not only efficient, but their price also dropped to 50 million RMB per unit. Then, as technology improved and production increased, a domestic machine now costs just over 20 million RMB—just one-seventeenth of the price of the original German models.
The idea of Germany's monopoly on the tunnel boring machine market was shattered overnight. It turned out that only a handful of countries in the world, such as Germany, Japan, and the United States, could produce them; they conspired to keep prices sky-high by raising them at will.
Now that China has joined the competition, their pricing system has completely collapsed. These days, to sell a German tunnel boring machine, they have to lower their prices to almost the same level as China.
And this is happening again and again in the technology market.
When the Chinese successfully develop airplane engines, the pride of the West, Boeing and Airbus companies will be in a red light overnight. That is why they want to contain China with various sanctions.
@ Sharifus Salekin Sahan
#ChineseTechnology
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