Headline in the Financial Times that I found hanging on my London hotel room door this morning:
“Birmingham Hails an Unlikely Savior: MG Rover [Britain’s last mass car producer], struggling to survive, is being offered a lifeline by a Chinese company [Shanghai Auto] that desires the carmaker’s design assets and the right to build Rover brand cars.”
The Chinese are … movin’ out! Loaded with a trillion bucks or so of accumulated loose change (while we stagger under the weight of an equally enormous deficit), they are breaking their isolated geographic bonds, ripping opening their wallets, and skipping steps in the process of completing the competitiveness puzzle by accumulating intellectual capita and branding skill and muscle.
Hint: This is not a small story!