why do you have to wake up our friends who still dream of china being a communist country where everyone is in absolute poverty? it's best to leave them in that fantasy.
although it focusses too much on a particular type of electronics activity to give the view much of a feel for the overall industry in China.
The story is too much on the not-so-important part of the ShenZheng SV: it focuses on the low-value add part, though I can understand why they picked up that.
Two things about ShenZheng that should scare SV:
1) the co-mingling of all sorts of technologies: hardware, software, chips, mobile, network, ..... People there understand very well that to make money, they have to work with other vendors. So the exchange of ideas is far more wide spread, expected and accepted than it is in the west.
2) the young age of decision makers: this is where most of the decision makers are 20 or 30 something. You go to a meeting and the boss is likely younger than you. they have the power to make decisions on the spot. experience is out, and "newness" is in.
the 2nd point was quite scary to me in particular. The first couple times I went to a few industry conferences there and I was absolutely shocked by the young audience. I was expecting then that most of the chinese engineers would be on PIC or AVR of the world and then I ran into a roomful of Chinese at a STM32 conference. The ST rep said that all he did was to go from one chinese city to another chinese city doing those conferences and handing out discovery boards.
I knew on that spot that 8-bit is dead. and I knew anyone in a high cost country would have to change their business model to survive.
and that was like 10 years ago.
SV is still ahead in most areas. It is just that their dominance is shrinking, and pretty fast.