Excellent recent article CMEC&GE17 Jul 2018 10:45
The below article from July 11th sums up our situation perfectly. This is happening.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2018/07/11/american-companies-and-chinese-belt-and-road-in-africa/
Multinational industrial giants appear to be winning substantially by partnering with major Chinese state-owned players in Africa. From early on, General Electric (GE) had come “fully prepared to partnering with mainland financial juggernauts, infrastructure builders, power producers to tap the business potential” along the Belt and Road. As early as 2015, GE partnered with China Machinery Engineering Corporation (CMEC) on the Kipeto wind farm.
While GE provides machinery, equipment, tech support, and training, CMEC is the project contractor. Strictly speaking, Kipeto wind farm is not a Chinese project given that CMEC was only the contractor, but it has paved the way to more diverse and in-depth cooperation between GE and other Chinese companies in Africa.
More recently, GE has been working with the state-owned Power Construction Corporation of China (Power China) to
build power plants and grids in African countries such as Nigeria. In November of 2017, the two companies launched a roadshow in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Kenya, during which they
showcased an in-depth market report on Nigeria’s grid system in response to challenges identified by the two companies in powering the country. The report represents a shift toward more proactive market development efforts to ensure that projects along the Belt and Road not only solve their primary goals of generating power at the source, but also provide a long-sighted view of benefits for end-users and effectively distribute power according to the country’s energy needs. Toward this end,
a memorandum of understanding was signed between GE and Power China.
GE’s cooperation with Power China is believed to be an evolution and expansion of the previous
EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction) project model for which Chinese infrastructure companies are famous. The Chinese and American companies are expanding beyond the tradition EPC role of Chinese contractors into the fields of “
joint market development, joint fundraising, and joint operation.” The Chinese side has its eyes on GE’s ability to bring in advanced infrastructure industrial capacity, technological knowledge, and international financing channels based on GE’s good reputation and credibility. In this sense, the projects may still be owned by the African countries, tendered and developed by a Chinese company, but the American company supplies the equipment and technology as well as jointly raising funding from non-Chinese sources. Furthermore, the shared vision is to design, plan, and systemize the African market, transforming single projects into an expanded net of related upstream and downstream opportunities.
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