I was sitting in a car on our way to a company with Joe, a business columnist from the New York Times, who recently paid his first trip to China, when he took out his ThinkPad TM, which was issued by the Times company for each of its journalist for use.

Founded in 1851, The New York Times was among the first papers that began covering Chinese stories as early as Qing Dynasty, at which time the ancient empire was on its downfall and forced to open its market to the world. When these newsmen were observing, writing and publishing stories concerning the reprobate state, they probably would by no means have imagined their successors, almost a century later, are now using the world’s most popular and advanced laptop owned by Chinese, who at that time was on the verge of collapse.

This became true when the Chinese PC manufacturer, Lenovo, completed the acquisition of IBM’s personal computer division in 2005, making itself the world’s fourth biggest personal computer manufacturer after HP, Dell and Acer.

An even more ironic merger began just two months ago and is expected to finish soon. Tata Motors from India, a former colony of the United Kingdom, acquired two of its top luxury automobile brands, Jaguar and Land Rover - one of their some thirty purchases during the past five years!

The world is changing.

For the last two hundred years, the West has been used to carrying out its own way of doing business. Being self-confident in the competitive strength of their products, westerners believe an open market is the only prerequisite in order to maximize their benefit. This was the case even only decades ago, when all the money was in the western hemisphere and most of the entrepreneurs in developing countries were still struggling to modernize their companies. Yet as the “developing” countries kept on developing, a brand new market appeared.

Just like the business professor C. K. Prahalad argues in his book “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”, even the poor in these countries constitute a market worth trillions of dollars. When the majority of people can’t afford an imported, luxury car, there is huge market for someone to make an economical and affordable car for them to buy. This is where Tata and many other successful “third world multinationals” are making their money from, as Tata announced their project to bring along Tata Nano, the world’s cheapest automobile, costing a mere 2,500 US dollars. “Twenty years ago, few people in India could have afforded even a twenty-five-hundred-dollar car. Today, tens of millions can.” said James Surowiecki in his article for the New Yorker, The Tata Invasion.

With their discovery of “the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid”, these third-world multinationals successfully survived when the first wave of impact came along with globalization – the world trading system set by the western world starting from the Industrial Revolution, came into being after the geographic exploration and strengthened by the two world wars. Now, they are ready to fight back.

Remarkably, they are not simply competing with their western rivals vis-à-vis directly. Instead, they chose a short cut: acquisition, where they are cleverly keeping themselves away from potential import restrictions and troublesome branding problems (which have been critical but always a big problem for most of the western multinationals). That’s why, as we can see, the New York Times Co. are still using the ThinkPad TM as their working PC even after its merge with Chinese Lenovo, for it has been equally well regarded as IBM’s once were (except that Lenovo were at first apprehensive about putting their company logo on the front of the laptop).

So, on hearing my summary of all these movements and changes made by the third-world, (notably eastern countries like China and India), as the second stage of the globalization, following the survival of domestic entrepreneurs and marked by their revolutionary “revenge”, or to put it mildly, the “participation” in the world market, Joe expectantly began to envision the third stage of globalization, in which the third-world multinationals gain the secure footholds in the world market and release products with their own independent Research & Development, and are finally able to export their own concepts of lifestyle worldwide. Noticing Lenovo recently released its IdeaPad TM, the advent of that third stage may not be far away.

To put it in the language of George Lucas, if we are now experiencing GLOBALIZATION: EPISODE II – THE REVENGE OF SITH, then soon there will be GLOBALIZATION: EPISODE III – RETURN OF THE JEDI.

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