Shanghai to Philadelphia with just 10 days in between
Many of the exhibitors in Philadelphia were in Shanghai just 10 days ago for an impressive show. Filtration & Separation Asia 2010 and the 6th China International Filtration & Separation Exhibition & Conference were held from 17th, Nov. to 19th Nov. in Index Shanghai.
There were 156 exhibitors. Two of the Philadelphia and Shanghai exhibitors were McIlvaine and Hollingsworth & Vose whose stands are shown in the accompanying pictures.
Manufacturing output in China already exceeds the U.S. Total GDP is expected to surpass the U.S. by 2030. India could surpass the U.S. in GDP within the next 50 years. Asia will be the World's growth engine through the rest of the 2lst century.
The suppliers of filters and media should not think in terms of domination by one country or region. The filtration market will be increasingly supplier rather than geographic centric.
In 2006 Hollingsworth & Vose installed a wet-laid microglass manufacturing line in its Suzhou, China mill to serve filtration and battery separator markets. In June 2010, H&V announced plans to rebuild one of its production lines at the Winchcombe, UK manufacturing site. This investment will result in step change performance improvements in the microglass media produced at the site, and will more than double H&V’s European microglass filtration and microglass battery separator manufacturing capability. H&V currently manufactures microglass media in the United States, Europe and Asia.
H&V is just one of many filter companies who are global in every sense of the word. So filtration companies should not be asking how to make the U.S. or Japan more competitive but how to make themselves a bigger global player. One of the tasks is to level the global playing field. Two ways to accomplish this are raising the knowledge level of both end users and suppliers and the second is to have precise translations of important concepts in any language.
Over 1 billion people speak Mandarin as the first language. 500 million speak English and 400 million speak Spanish. With less than 10% of the customers fluent in English there is a big need to provide accurate equivalents of technical words in other languages. The problem is that we don’t even have accurate definitions in English. Mcilvaine has invented the term “liquid macrofiltration as the parent to belt filter presses, filter presses, sand filters, bag filters, gravity belt filters, and candle filters. The parent of liquid macrofiltration is liquid filtration. Two siblings are cartridges and cross flow membranes. These classifications were painstakingly forged based on the important criteria which link one subject with another. The uninformed neophyte has trouble understanding why a membrane cartridge and an RO module are not lumped together. A system which instantly conveys this understanding would be of great value.
All decision making is classification. If the end user can be supplied with the proper classifications in a language he understands then he will make more knowledgeable purchasing decisions. Mcilvaine is undertaking this very ambitious task but will be receiving assistance from the American Filtration and Separations Society and from the China Filtration and Separation committee. In fact the chairman, Wang Yan-xi will be here in Philadelphia. We are also asking suppliers to weigh in on their recommendations for classifications and to review definitions in various languages.
So if you are interested in leveling the international playing field and want more information click on: www.mcilvainecompany.com and then on Free News and Searches. Then click on “decisive classification”. Also from the home page you can click on Knowledge Based Sales and find out how to take advantage of the level field.
