China’s infrastructure investments will be huge
China’s Twelfth Five-Year Plan has 62 chapters that cover the country’s economic, social and political goals. As I said before, if you intend to do business in China, you need to be familiar with it and understand what it is and is not.
The plan is a set of goals which have been developed by internal working groups and passed by the nation’s legislative process. Like most legislation, it has a big title, lofty goals and very little about how anything will be accomplished.
It is not a detailed blueprint but more of a broad strategic statement. Think of it more along the lines of a directive by the board of directors to the management and the shareholders.
Unfortunately, facts and realities do not prevent people from reading what they want into the document. For business purposes, it might be more useful to skip to what the initiatives identified in the plan could mean for your company.
For example: China intends to continue its massive infrastructure investment programs building roads, bridges, rail, ports, pipelines, power plants and housing. If you have products or services that are not currently available in China, which can create a positive return on the investment within three years, you should be getting your ducks in a row before others beat you to the market.
Read more in the Dispatches from China column in BizTimes Milwaukee.
