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Twenty years ago when Larry Denman Clarke founded Spar Aerospace of Toronto, people would have scoffed at the idea that his company would one day become the leading supplier to the satellite communications industry in China.
Spar was the new kid in the block, and China, for its part, had no aerospace industry to speak of. The scientists and engineers who had the skill to make one were, at that moment, diverted from their task by the ideological destructiveness of the so-called Cultural Revolution. At the same time as Clarke was trying to build his high-tech firm in Toronto, many of his Chinese counterparts were probably working as farm laborers.
Today the pendulum has swung in the other direction and China is eager for industrial ties with the West. Spar, the leading firm in satellite communications in Canada, has also entered the Chinese market in a relatively big way, mainly through the sale of earth stations. The value of these sales over a 16-year period has been estimated by a knowledgable company source at $42 million.
The biggest leap in sales occurred after January 1984 when contracts worth close to $30 million were signed with three government ministries to deliver earth stations and start-up kits for China's burgeoning domestic satellite communication networks.
These stations are the forerunners of possibly thousands more that the Chinese will build for voice and data communications and TV broadcast in China.
As of early 1988 Spar had supplied China with 31 earth stations and more were on order. Those now operating serve the country's first two domestic networks -- one for general communications and linking remote parts of the country such as Mongolia and Tibet with the capital, Beijing; the other earmarked specifically for communications in the petroleum industry, especially between oil production centres.
A vital part of the deal was a Spar-designed training and technology program to equip the Chinese themselves to manufacture, operate, and maintain the earth stations. In 1986 some 150 engineers came for training at Spar's St.-Anne-de-Bellevue plant in Quebec, where the earth stations were made. Using Spar's manufacturing processes and component kits, the designated Chinese factory for earth station production, located in Nanjing, has begun fulfilling some of the requirements of the domestic Chinese industry.