What does decades in China look like for a major multinational?
Secretary Penny Pritzker and Deputy Secretary Bruce Andrews visited Honeywell’s booth during their tour of the trade show floor at Hannover Messe. Credit: U.S. Department of Commerce, Creative Commons
Honeywell is a global company that traces its roots back to the invention of the furnace regulator in 1885. Today, its business lines include defense, aviation, chemical production, warehouse automation, and, it hopes, a new face-mask-noise-cancelling-headphone developed with musician Will.i.am.
It also has a major presence in China, a country it first entered in 1935. After China re-established formal relations with the U.S. in 1979, Honeywell began setting up joint ventures with state-owned firms in the early 1990s. Later, it set up wholly-owned subsidiaries in China and hired executives who have grown up in the country.
Its long history in China, and huge scale across multiple sectors, can be seen as a microcosm of multinationals’ evolving presence in China. “At the beginning, in the ’80s and even into the ’90s, the vast, vast majority of foreign investment going into China was in joint ventures,” says Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for I
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