MRI machines from China?

Most people will be shocked at how fast they are climbing the value chain. From this article (excerpted from Ted Fishman's book) in Inc. magazine:

Given how quickly China is climbing the industrial ladder, perhaps the next question is whether any commercial technology is beyond an imminent challenge from China. Gal Dymant, an American Israeli venture capitalist in Beijing, believes the answer is that few will be. One of the companies Dymant works with, a database publisher named Asia Direct, produces an annual China Hi-Tech Directory. Tracking the directory's updates year to year gives Dymant an informal measure of the shifts in Chinese industry.

The first thing one notices about the directories, he says, is how much thicker they grow every year, particularly in industries where there have been large foreign investments. In 2003, Asia Direct's volume grew considerably fatter in the sections devoted to China's domestic mobile-phone manufacturers and suppliers, broadband communications, and in companies establishing themselves in cities outside of China's eastern powerhouses. The manufacture and sale of integrated chips is also soaring, along with healthy gains in China's software and information-services markets. Then again, every section in the directory has grown, including biotechnology, semiconductors, and Internet development, areas in which Chinese firms have newly established themselves, many now in partnership with the world's leading technology-driven companies.

For his part, Dymant is putting together an investor group to build a Chinese version of one of the world's most advanced and costly medical devices, the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. "The talent is here to build anything," Dymant says. "We think we can develop MRIs for about 60% of the price they are built for in the U.S."