Inside the Chinese Boom in Corporate Espionage
By Michael Riley and Ashlee Vance on March 15, 2012
Last June, three men squeezed inside a wind turbine in China’s Gobi Desert. They were employees of American Superconductor Corp. (AMSC), a Devens (Mass.)-based maker of computer systems that serve as the electronic brains of wind turbines. From time to time, AMSC workers are required to head out to a wind farm in some desolate location—that’s where the wind usually is—to check on the equipment, do maintenance, make repairs, and keep the customers happy.
On this occasion, the AMSC technicians were investigating a malfunction. They entered the cylindrical main shaft of the turbine, harnessed themselves to a ladder, and climbed 230 feet in darkness up to the nacelle, an overpacked compartment that holds the machinery used to convert the rotation of the blades into electricity. AMSC had been using the turbine, manufactured by the company’s largest customer, China’s Sinovel Wind Group, to test a new version of its control system software. The software was designed to disable the turbine several weeks earlier, at the end of the testing period. But for some reason, this turbine ignored the system’s shutdown command and the blades kept right on spinning.
The AMSC technicians tapped into the turbine’s computer to get to the bottom of the glitch. The problem wasn’t immediately clear, so the technicians made a copy of the control system’s software and sent it to the company’s research center in Klagenfurt, Austria, which produced some startling findings. The Sinovel turbine appeared to be running a stolen version of AMSC’s software. Worse, the software revealed that Sinovel had complete access to AMSC’s proprietary source code. In short, Sinovel didn’t really need AMSC anymore.
Three days after that expedition in the Gobi, Daniel McGahn, AMSC’s chief executive officer, got the news on his cell phone while he was traveling in Russia. Hired in 2006, McGahn helped revamp the then-floundering company by focusing it on two things: China and wind power. Those bets paid off for a while, as Sinovel bought more and more turbine controllers from AMSC. Then in March 2011, Sinovel abruptly and inexplicably began turning away AMSC’s shipments at its enormous turbine assembly factory in Liaoning province.
On April 5, AMSC had no choice but to announce that Sinovel—now its biggest customer, accounting for more than two-thirds of the company’s $315 million in revenue in 2010—had stopped making purchases. Investors fled, erasing 40 percent of AMSC’s value in a single day and 84 percent of it by September. The company’s stock chart looks like the EKG of a person rushing toward white light.
On June 15, standing in a St. Petersburg office tower, McGahn listened to the report from the Austrian team for 30 minutes and felt the blood drain from his face. He had been trying for months to save the relationship with Sinovel and was making almost no progress. By the time he ended the call from his Austrian team, he knew why.
What McGahn says happened to AMSC may be incredibly brazen, but it’s hardly exceptional. There have been a large number of corporate spying cases involving China recently, and they are coming to light as President Barack Obama and the U.S., along with Japan and the European Union, have filed a formal complaint to the World Trade Organization over China’s unfair trading practices. The complaint includes the hoarding of rare earths, the metals required for the manufacture of other green energy technologies such as batteries for hybrid vehicles.
In November, 14 U.S. intelligence agencies issued a report describing a far-reaching industrial espionage campaign by Chinese spy agencies. This campaign has been in the works for years and targets a swath of industries: biotechnology, telecommunications, and nanotechnology, as well as clean energy. One U.S. metallurgical company lost technology to China’s hackers that cost $1 billion and 20 years to develop, U.S. officials said last year. An Apple (AAPL) global supply manager pled guilty in 2011 to funneling designs and pricing information to China and other countries; a Ford Motor (F) engineer was sentenced to six years in prison in 2010 for trying to smuggle 4,000 documents, including design specs, to China. Earlier this month, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told Congress that China-based hackers had gained access to sensitive files stored on computers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
As the toll adds up, political leaders and intelligence officials in the U.S. and Europe are coming to a disturbing conclusion. “It’s the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, said at a security conference at New York’s Fordham University in January.
In other espionage cases, such as those involving Google (GOOG), Lockheed Martin (LMT), and DuPont (DD), thieves did a far better job of covering their digital tracks. Sinovel, however, was caught red-handed. AMSC has presented to law enforcement officials in Austria and China computer logs and messages that show Sinovel courting one of the U.S. company’s employees and paying him to aid in the code heist. “It’s a red-hot smoking gun example,” says John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Democratic senator from AMSC’s home state of Massachusetts. “If this is the way the Chinese choose to do business, it’s going to be very contentious and tough sledding ahead for this relationship.”
U.S. politicians and corporate executives have groused about China’s intellectual property abuses for years, to little effect. China often promises to take a harder stance against such thefts but rarely backs up the words with actions. For example, Chinese officials have promised to crack down on the theft of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows operating system; the company says it’s still seeing mass downloads of its software that were never paid for. McGahn, though, has taken a highly unusual step. He decided to fight back—in China.
AMSC has filed four civil complaints against Sinovel in Chinese courts—where Sinovel has a steep home-field advantage—seeking $1.2 billion in damages. Sinovel has filed its own countersuits claiming that AMSC owes it $207 million for problems including defective equipment. Sinovel declined to make its chairman available for interview or to comment for this story. And because Chinese courts do not make legal documents available to the public, it was not possible to read Sinovel’s counterclaims. “How China responds to this is going to be central to how they respond to other issues of concern between us,” Kerry says.
AMSC was founded in 1987 by four professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The idea was to develop power transmission lines made from cooled superconductive material, which dramatically reduces energy loss. At the time, superconductivity looked like science’s latest gift to big business. But the technology has never quite lived up to those early hopes, and AMSC’s business wallowed in the red for decades. In 2006 the company hired McGahn, a gregarious executive with a masters degree in marine engineering from MIT, as a vice president charged with exploring new businesses.
As McGahn surveyed AMSC’s technology, he focused on the company’s research into wind-turbine control systems. A modern 1.5-Megawatt turbine is the equivalent of a 160-ton, high-performance pinwheel. Each gets stuffed with as much as $200,000 worth of electronics, including a power converter and what’s called a programmable logic controller, an industrial computer the size of a couple of cigarette cartons. These devices are used to do everything from filling up the bottles in a Budweiser (BUD) brewery to controlling valves in oil pipelines. In the case of turbines, they can rapidly adjust the yaw and pitch of blades, among other functions. McGahn sensed an opportunity to take this technology and capitalize on China’s efforts to harvest energy from the wind.
The same year AMSC hired McGahn, China passed a clean energy law calling for the creation of seven 10,000-Mw wind farms in strategic zones throughout the country, including Gansu, Zhejiang, Inner Mongolia, and Jiangsu provinces. The law made China the hottest wind market in the world. In 2009, according to a U.S. wind industry report, a new turbine was going up in China every hour. By 2020 just one of those wind farms may produce as much power as 10 nuclear power reactors.
AMSC began packaging the electronic components and selling them to China’s small but growing domestic manufacturers, which had plenty of capital and cheap labor to make the turbines’ steel skeletons but lacked the sophisticated gadgetry to run them. The arrangement was working the way it was supposed to: China would turn out the commodity hardware—the turbines—and an American company would retain control of the high-margin intellectual capital end of the business. “We always saw it as a symbiotic relationship of having China’s low manufacturing cost coupled with Western technology,” McGahn says. “We would grow as they grew.”....
Inside the Chinese Boom in Corporate Espionage - Businessweek
This is a very long article. I won't post all of it but there is the link if you'd like to check it out. To sum it all up in one sentence, China steals much of what it 'invents'.
When China was inventing some of the fairer skinned were still living in caves。
Now China is starting to invent again after a short 200 years in its long history,the whites are worried to death for fear of losing their control of the world。
Oh boy, are we going back to the 'gunpowder thing' again ? Oh, and spaghetti, too.