The chinese fireworks industry-revised

THE CHINESE FIREWORKS INDUSTRY-REVISED
In February 2009, Jerry Yu was spending the Chinese New Year holidays in Liuyang, a city known as “the home of firecrackers and fireworks”, located in HunanProvince in China. Jerry was an ABC. With an MBA, he was running a small family – owned chain of gift stores in Brooklyn, New York. Liuyang was his mother´s hometown. During his visit, his relativesinvited him to invest in fireworks factory that was owned by a village. Mr. Yu had been impressed by the extravagant fireworks shows he had seen during the festival, however, he wanted to assess howattractive the Chinese fireworks industry was before he even looked at the financial details of the factory.
HISTORY OF FIREWORKS AND FIRECRACKERS
Fireworks referred to any devices designed to producevisual or audible, effects through combustion or explosion. The art of making fireworks was formally known as pyrotechnics. Firecrackers were a specific kind of fireworks, usually in the form of anoisemaking cylinder. Firecrackers were often strung together and fused consecutively, a staple of Chinese New Year celebrations, weddings, grand openings, births, deaths and other ceremonial occasions.The main ingredients of fireworks had remained almost the same over the past thousand years: 75 parts by weight potassium nitrate, 15 parts charcoal and 10 parts sulfur. It burned briskly whenlighted, but did not erupt or make any noise. When it was found that a projectile could be thrust out of a barrel by keeping the powder at one end and igniting it, black powder became known as gunpowder.Today, smokeless powder has replaced black powder as the propellant in modern weaponry, but black powder remains a main ingredient in fireworks, both as a propellant and as a bursting charge.
It wasgenerally believed that the Chinese were the first makers of fireworks. The Chinese made war rockets and explosives as early as the sixth century. One legend said that a Chinese cook, while toiling...