China as a market

Just heard Alan Wood CBE, chief exec of Siemens UK and speaker at the CBI conference, on the Today programme. He was being interviewed about the trend for foreign companies to buy UK businesses and argued that while this was not a positive movement, legal barriers to overseas acquirers were not appropriate. Instead, he said, British business needs to get more outward facing, seeing China and India not as sources of cheap labour but as huge potential markets - and the government should lobby to ensure they are as open to UK exports as we are to their imports.

All motherhood and apple pie (at least for a capitalist - he could hardly call or less free markets, although the leader of the capitalist world, the US, has plenty of funny quirks and folds in its free trade eiderdown). But then he said, (and I paraphrase) "We have to look at China as the single biggest market in the world."

Hmm. I wonder. Is China really the single biggest market? One might successfully argue that England and Scotland are different markets (especially for services - in goods, it's still probably advisable to operate off the logisticians' approach to geographic proximity when discussing "markets"), let alone Britain and Italy. Is Shanghai the same market as Zhuzhou or Chonqing or Xi'an or Urumqi? Is doing business in Delhi the same as in Cochin or Calcutta or Patna? You'd treat Lahore differently from Amritsar, but they're relatively close neighbours.

Perhaps that's the key: start thinking of true markets and not nation states. Yes, the legal and regulatory borders are still significant. But if we think of peoples by our own, rather crude and dare I say imperialist, categorisations, we'll never really be able to sell to them properly.

One day I'll round to publishing my thoughts on the death throes of the concept of the nation state...