I noticed an article in The Globe and Mail, a newspaper in Toronto, describing the efforts in Vancouver to become a Gateway to China.  The article is well written, and contains several interesting bits of information, including:

“But it is impossible not to see the growing gap as a symptom of the kind of complacency that Mr. Woo decries. Consider also the disturbing fact that Canada is losing ground in Asia. Two decades ago, Canadian business had a market share of 2.5 per cent, a robust amount considering the size of this country’s economy. Ten years later, Canada’s market share had fallen to 1.7 per cent. And today, as opportunities in China mushroom, Canadian business has less than 1 per cent of the market, and is fading to the point of irrelevancy.”

I wonder why Canada’s market share of China exports is shrinking by so much.  I also wonder who is benefiting.

Anyway, the globalization aspect that hit closest to home for me was the following:

“Times are good in booming B.C., so it’s easy enough to let that long-term peril, however serious, slip off this quarter’s to-do list. There are exceptions, one of the most notable being Next Level Games Inc., a Vancouver video game developer that has made expansion into China a cornerstone of its strategy for dealing with the overheating labour market in B.C., the threat of a rising Canadian dollar and the increasing demands of the newest gaming platforms.

The company has set up a 12-person operation in Beijing to produce the art for its video games, the animation that meshes with computer programming. After a year, CEO Douglas Tronsgard says his firm sees it as an unqualified success. The firm’s latest video game for Nintendo, Mario Strikers Charged, is a bestseller in Japan. And the relatively cheap salaries of the Chinese artists - half the cost of their Canadian counterparts, even though they’re being paid top wages in China - means that the dollar’s surge past parity is of no great concern to Next Level.”

While I was happy to see that they were successful, it does poke a hole in part of my story that western companies will find significant challenges in setting up small captive labs in China.  Normally, I would strongly advise someone like Mr. Tronsgard to consider outsourcing to one of the excellent game development art studios in China.