......................The reality is that the rules of capitalism are being re-written in Mumbai, Beijing, Brasilia and Moscow – not London or New York. ..................
On March 19, 2012, at a mission control station in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, local authorities took control of NigComSat IR, the country’s first communications satellite. Built by China and launched into space by a Long March rocket, the satellite will save African nations $750 million annually. Until now, this money was flowing into the coffers of Western companies.
In the early part of the last decade, South Korean giants Samsung and LG introduced a new line of HD TVs, refrigerators and mobile phones that catapulted them to premium status. It didn’t take long for their Japanese and European rivals to find out what was helping the Koreans leapfrog the rest – Russian scientists. Turns out, hundreds of underemployed scientists and innovators at Russian labs had joined the Korean chaebols, taking with them bleeding-edge technologies that gave the Koreans a decisive edge.
As Europe looks at reducing its dependence on Russian gas, China is going in the opposite direction. Moscow and Beijing are circling around a gas deal that could well be the biggest contract in history. The deal between the world’s largest energy producer and its largest consumer is potentially worth $1 trillion, and would see up to 70 billion cubic metres of gas (almost equal to Qatar’s annual production) piped to China each year from fields in Siberia.
Three years ago Airtel, India’s largest and the world’s fifth largest mobile phone operator, pumped in over $10 billion to build a cellular network across Africa. Nobody expected the company to recover its money but Airtel’s low-cost, high volumes bet on Africa’s exploding middle class paid off. Earlier this year it touched 50 million customers in 16 African countries, in the process checkmating archrival Vodafone of Britain. READ MORE
