The Kickstarter ploy here is what's gross. Last year at a Formnext party, a Chinese founder was bragging after a few drinks that he got his factory and land free from the government, I just checked, of course they ran a KS too 🤦
The playbook is simple: wait until the new tech has all the dead ends solved, start a company, take the subsidies and tax breaks, and milk the Western community.
The new Creality IPO paperwork is a rare glimpse into how this works, if anyone wants to dig. But it is very surface level. For deeper research into this topic you'll need a Chinese phone, bank account, etc to access most of the source. Because of course - no one can fact check this way or if local, get into trouble 😬 (My father couldn't even study before '89, the communists took our family's property two generations earlier.) Since I started saying publicly that we're researching this, a lot of previously public documents have quietly disappeared 🤔
The CCP state support worked too well. In the last 6 years the desktop market got wiped, 95% China, the remaining 5% is Prusa. The billions being dumped into it are not just for the benefit of the Western consumer. I should do a longer write up after Makerfaire Prague!
BTW It would be too funny if these are the guys we caught in our locked private room checking the CORE One INDX prototype the night before the Formnext reveal 🤣