When Beijing Betters London And Shanghai LA

By 2025, Shanghai and Beijing will have higher GDPs than Los Angeles and London, a further sign of the world’s eastwards economic shift. The prediction comes from the McKinsey Global Institute, the economic research arm of McKinsey & Co., the international consultancy firm, which has been working on mapping the changing economic power of the world’s metropolitan areas, and is recirculating some work on this it first released in March. Shanghai is already among the world’s top 50 cities ranked by GDP, but as well a Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, Foshan, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Shenyang, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Wuhan and Xian will all join it by 2025, McKinsey predicts. European cities will be most numerous among the dropouts, but another will be Taipei.

Foxconn Expands Inland Production Capacity

Foxconn, the Taiwanese-owned electronics contractor whose Shenzhen plants were hit by a wave of suicides earlier this year, is to expand its presence in Chengdu with a new assembly plant there, the latest of a number of new inland factories. Foxconn is owned by Hon Hai Group and numbers some of the best known global technology brands among its customers such as Apple, HP, Sony and Nokia.

Since the suicides put the company into the international spotlight it has opened new assembly plants in Henan, Hebei, Shanxi and Hubei provinces as well as raising wages and improving living conditions for workers at its giant Shenzhen operations. The Chengdu plant is expected to produce advanced panels for LCD TVs and tablet PCs. Foxconn has already has started producing Apple’s iPads there and the new plant will let it expand production of these. Hon Hai has reportedly allocated $275 million for investment in six new Chinese plants, most of them inland.