Jens Pedersen has long maintained a simple rule of thumb for gauging his company’s position against Chinese competitors: “We can’t compete on anything that can be packed in a 40-foot container.”
Pedersen is in the wind business. His company, Welcon, is based in rural Denmark and produces the steel towers that support the nacelle and rotor blades of the modern wind turbine. Often standing over 300-feet tall and weighing 500 metric tons, wind towers do not fit in 40-foot containers. Even when broken down into multiple sections, transporting the enormous steel tubes locally holds its challenges. The roundabouts near Welcon’s offices are sometimes cut in half so that transport trucks carrying towers and turbine blades can drive straight through. Moving the massive constructs across continents is another story altogether.
“It just does not make sense to have tower sections shipped around the world,” says Pedersen.
Yet China has a way of defying basic logic in global i
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