Quality of Chinese Equipment in Question - Auditing its Performance

• Date: April 29, 2010
• Source: Admin

Quality of Chinese equipments, day-by-day, is becoming a serious concern for the Indian government. A few recent incidents that went against the Chinese product qualities are also fueling the doubt.

In power equipments, the Indian government feels that Chinese equipment fails to attain its optimum result when fired with Indian coal. And their feeling turned into belief when the turbine blades of the MW Sagardighi project of West Bengal Power Development Corporation, supplied by the Chinese manufacturing company Dongfang, failed miserably. As a result of this failure, the apex power sector planning body, the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) initiated a technical audit of Chinese equipments.

CEA during its audit in BHEL observed, quality wise the Chinese products are at par with the Indian ones but, when an India based top business house, Indiabulls cancelled its order placed with China and placed the same order from BHEL, the controversy about the quality of the Chinese products got aggravated.

Bharat Heavy Electrical Ltd or commonly known as BHEL is the largest manufacturer of power equipment in the country. Recently the company has shown its concern regarding the quality of the power generation equipments supplied by the Chinese manufacturers. And, BHEL has also claimed that the performance of its equipment has been constantly 2% higher than other available equipments and its operating availability is also higher.

However, not only Dongfang Electric, Harbin Power Equipment Company and Sepco are also among the big players that have bagged big-ticket orders from Indian market.

Of all the mentioned news, the most controversial and significant one that recently shocked the Indian government is perhaps the Chinese mobile equipments controversy. It is to be believed that the Chinese mobile equipments are carrying spyware or malware capable of infringing Indian security system by providing security information to foreign intelligence agencies through telecom networks. Accepting the seriousness of the news, government has officially banned importing any equipment manufactured by Chinese vendors, including Huawei and ZTE. Though government announcement on limiting the usage of Chinese mobile equipments is not taking place for the first time in India however this is the first time the ban is announced as official.

Earlier, the Indian government banned the import of Chinese headsets that comes without IMEI number. The government’s decision of banning Chinese mobile equipments is undoubtedly going to give a huge blow to companies like ZTE and Huawei that have big betting on the Indian mobile phone market. Also, with the banning decision Indian vendors are going to be affected as well as they mostly bank upon the attractive schemes provided by the Chinese companies. However, the European and U.S. based mobile companies are assumed to be the biggest gainer of the ban.

Source:

http://businesstoday.intoday.in/index.php?issueid=81&id=7744&option=com_content&task=view

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2010/04/29/stories/2010042952880100.htm