WCA July 2009

unprecedented new prosperity. He believes that the country — assuming its wise use of the money for infrastructure improvements in President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package — is poised to do it again. Having made use of the word “crisis,” Mr Florida quickly discards it. Writing in the Atlantic (formerly Atlantic Monthly), he said he favours “great reset” to describe the present moment in US history, one holding promise for a vibrant new economy on the other side of the current turbulence. His hopes for this new economy, which dispenses with key products and lifestyles of the old order, rest on what he sees as a concentrated new geography — “one that allows more people to mix more freely and interact more efficiently in a discrete number of dense, innovative mega-regions and creative cities.” (“How the Crash Will Reshape America,” March) While there is nothing new in the idea of cities as incubators of progressive ideas, the urban centres of Mr Florida’s vision are perhaps more accurately described as crucibles — for accelerated invention, innovation, and creation, the activities “in which the US still holds a big competitive advantage.” Connected by high-speed rail, brought together by greatly expanded broadband access and telecommuting, these centres will, Mr Florida believes, carve a new landscape on the United States. What will this new landscape look like? Unfortunately for those parts of the Southeast dependent on manufacturing, for the Midwest, and for many of the cities of the Southwest, the new geography will favour the great mega-regions already in existence, pushing them outward and upward. In a throwaway line of great significance, Mr Florida writes, “It will be a landscape suited to a world in which petroleum is no longer cheap by any measure.” Some points in Mr Florida’s stimulating article: The mega-regions of North America include Sun Belt ❖ ❖ centres like the Charlotte-Atlanta Corridor, Northern and Southern California, the Texas Triangle of Houston–San Antonio–Dallas, and Southern Florida’s Tampa-Orlando-Miami area; the Pacific Northwest’s Cascadia, stretching from Portland through Seattle to Vancouver; and both Greater Chicago and Toronto-Buf- falo-Rochester in the old Rust Belt. New York shed almost 17,000 jobs in the financial ❖ ❖ industry from October 2007 to October 2008. But New York is much, much more than a financial centre. It has been the nation’s largest city for roughly two centuries, and today sits in America’s largest metropolitan area as the hub of the country’s largest mega-region. It is home to a diverse and innovative economy built around a broad range of creative industries. The financial crisis fanning out from Wall Street may ultimately help New York by re-energising its creative economy. The New York-based Dow Jones Industrial Average ❖ ❖ was actually among the world’s better-performing stock-market indices last year. Foreign capital has flooded into the US, which apparently remains a safe haven in uncertain times.

By about 2000, BYD had become one of the world’s largest manufacturers of cell phone batteries. It has designed and manufactured mobile-phone handsets and parts for Motorola, of the US; Nokia, of Finland; British-based Sony Ericsson; and South Korea’s Samsung. (“Warren Buffett Takes Charge,” 13 th April) The performance of BYD under Mr Wang came to the attention of Mr Buffett, whose vaunted shrewdness had led him to shun the booming US tech industry of the 1990s. Mr Gunther wrote, “BYD makes about 80% of Motorola’s RAZR handsets, as well as batteries for Apple iPods and iPhones and low-cost computers, including those distributed by [the] One Laptop per Child non-profit based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Revenues, which have grown by about 45% annually during the past five years, reached $4 billion in 2008.” But it is principally as a car maker that “the sage ❖ ❖ of Omaha” sees Mr Wang. In 2003, the Chinese entrepreneur acquired a Chinese state-owned car company that was all but defunct. Last October, according to Fortune, a BYD model called the F3 became the top-selling sedan in China, topping such rivals as the Volkswagen Jetta and Toyota Corolla. The Chinese company is already selling a plug-in electric car with a backup gasoline engine, putting it ahead of GM, Nissan, and Toyota. The F3DM (for ‘dual mode’) from BYD reportedly goes farther (62 miles) on a single charge than other electric vehicles, and its sticker price of about $22,000 is lower than that projected for the plug-in Prius and Chevy Volt when they hit the market in late 2010. As noted in Fortune, “Put simply, this little-known upstart has accelerated ahead of its much bigger rivals in the race to build an affordable electric car. Today BYD employs 130,000 people in 11 factories, eight in China and one each in India, Hungary, and Romania.” In taking the 10% stake in BYD for Berkshire Hathaway, Mr Buffett violated a personal rule against investing in anything he does not understand. “I don’t know a thing about cell phones or batteries,” he told Mr Gunther. “And I don’t know how cars work.” His trusted partners understand these things. For himself, Mr Buffett said, it is enough that “what has been accomplished since 1995 at BYD is extraordinary.”

‘A new geography’

Technological innovation is seen as shaping the post-recession United States The urban theorist Richard Florida is an optimist. Citing the dictum “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” the author of The Rise of the Creative Class asserts that the US, whatever its flaws, has seldom wasted its crises. On the contrary, it has used them to reinvent itself, leading every time to remarkable innovation and industrial growth and

Dorothy Fabian Features Editor

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Wire & Cable ASIA – July/August 2009