中國的“山寨手機”業績卓越

The white BMW Mr. Liu drives around this humid coastal city in southern China may be real, but the spiffy little black smart phone he carries with him is definitely fake.

　　行駛在中國東南沿海城市的劉先生所開的白色寶馬車可能是真的，但他手中的精美小巧的黑色手機卻是真真正正的贗品。

　　Phone clones: China's 'bandit' mobile phone market is huge.
　　手機：中國的“山寨”手機市場巨大.

　　"But it has Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, FM radio, a digital video camera, hundreds of games, even a voice recorder," says Liu. "And I invested over $500,000 to make it."
　　“但這款手機具有藍牙、GPS、無線網卡、調頻收音機、數碼攝像頭、數百個游戲和錄音功能�！眲⑾壬f�！拔覟榇送顿Y了50萬美元�！�

　　Liu, a 31-year-old who studied fine arts in college and designs cigarette cartons on the side, is one of countless thousands here who've earned big bucks manufacturing "gray market" mobile phones, millions of which are not only being sold across China but also exported to dozens of developing countries in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and other regions around the world.
　　劉先生，31歲，在大學學習美術專業，兼職設計香煙盒。他是數以千計個以生產“灰色市場”手機發家的人之一。這類手機，不僅暢銷中中國各地，也出口到數十個非洲、拉丁美洲、中東和其他地區的發展中國家。

　　"They are everywhere," said Karl Weaver, a wireless evangelist and mobile device specialist for the Chinese handset ecosystem. "You can find them in major department stores and malls, in back alleys and in underground markets. Everyone is selling them. It is really very entrepreneurial."
　　Karl Weaver，一個傳教士兼中國手機市場專家。他說：“到處都是山寨貨。你可以在大的商場或購物中心買到，可以在小巷里買到，也可以在地下市場買到。每個人都在賣山寨機，這真是非常企業化了！”

　　In 2008, an estimated 150 million, or 20 percent, of the 750 million handsets produced in China were either counterfeit or off-brand phones, according to CCID Consulting, a market research firm based in Beijing. Of those, over 51 million were sold in China while the remainder were sent to foreign markets.
　　據一家北京的市場調研公司CCID調查，2008年，在中國生產的7億5千萬手機中，有一億五千萬或者說20%的手機不是偽造的就是沒有注冊商標的。該調查還顯示，在這些手機中，超過5100萬的手機在中國銷售，而其他的都遠銷國外。

　　Known here as "shanzhai ji", or bandit phones, China's gray market handset industry was virtually non-existent just a few years ago. While a handful of illegal companies produced black market mobiles, they often were of poor quality mainly because the technology needed to make them was hard to come by and even harder to master.
　　“山寨機”的生產在前幾年還處于萌芽狀態。那時，只有幾個公司非法生產這種手機。這類手機通常質量低劣。因為制造手機的技術很難獲取，更不用說掌握了。

　　This all changed in 2005 when Mediatek, a microchip design company from Taiwan, developed what experts call a turnkey solution -- a platform that integrated many complex mobile phone software systems onto a single chip. This made it much easier and cheaper to build handsets and churn out new models at astounding speeds.
"[Mediatek] basically commoditized the entire market," said Jonathan Li, founder of Shanghai-based technology design studio Asentio Design. "They made it really simple and really cheap to make your own phone. Almost anybody could do it."
　　這一切在2005年有了翻天腹地的變化。臺灣的一家叫做MEDIATEK的微電子設計公司發明了一種專家稱為“全程解決方案”的平臺，這種平臺把很多復雜的手機軟件系統集成到一張電路板上。這樣，制造手機就變得容易而且成本更低，而且以驚人的速度不斷推出新款型。

　　The shanzhai business got another boost a couple of years later when the Chinese government relaxed regulations limiting the number of companies that could manufacture handsets, lowering the entry barrier for hundreds of entrepreneurs eager to have a piece of the world's biggest mobile phone market.

　　"It is so easy to do because this whole ecosystem is in China," said Weaver. "It isn't so complex for a guy to figure out by watching how the global supply chain works in the mobile handset space to do his own thing."
　　兩年后中國政府放松了對于生產手機的工廠的數量管制后，山寨機產業突飛猛進。降低的門檻讓無數創業者對于中國，這個世界最大手機市場躍躍欲試。