Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud recently had a high profile meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. Saudi Arabia is aggressively seeking foreign investment to diversify its economy away from oil. So the relationship with China is a high priority for the country. The Xi-Salman meeting produced the usual photos and […]
I eat at Pizza Hut in Beijing all the time. Partly because it’s close to campus and partly because the brutality of Chinese restaurant competition is fun to watch. Chinese restaurants are developing economy hyper-competition. They fight for the high-traffic and high-visibility locations. They fight for good managers. They try to localize to China and […]
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast indefinite delay in Malaysia, due to its “exclusively gay moment”, has been lifted. Disney refused to release the movie in the country without it and Malaysia caved. Meanwhile, the movie has opened huge in China, with 100,000 reported screenings on its opening night. This constituted 43% of China’s screenings that […]
Greetings from Peking University in Beijing. It has been an amazing month. Lots of big developments in US-China business. And, in a crazy bit of luck, I ended up talking with Warren Buffett for a couple of hours over lunch – which I have written up in the articles below. Cheers, Jeff – Articles – Grocery […]
Two plus years into Alibaba’s push into entertainment, its movie arm, Alibaba Pictures, has a growing pipeline of produced and acquired content. It is regularly doing domestic and Hollywood deals in film production, financing and distribution. And it is making unconventional moves in cinema software, online videos, ticketing apps and film crowdfunding. Putting it together, […]
During the 2007 financial crisis, former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince famously said: “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” Looking at the bike-sharing business in China today, you see a lot of such dancing. You […]
In February 2017, I chaperoned 20 business students from Peking University to meet Warren Buffett in Omaha. It turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime trip, an investment pilgrimage of sorts. In 4 articles, I document what happened and what we learned. I have included a lot of detail, especially on the Berkshire companies we […]
In February 2017, I chaperoned 20 business students from Peking University to meet Warren Buffett in Omaha. It turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime trip, an investment pilgrimage of sorts. In 4 articles, I document what happened and what we learned. I have included a lot of detail, especially on the Berkshire companies we visited […]
In February 2017, I chaperoned 20 business students from Peking University to meet Warren Buffett in Omaha. It turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime trip, an investment pilgrimage of sorts. In 4 articles, I document what happened and what we learned. I have included a lot of detail, especially on the Berkshire companies we visited […]
In February 2017, I chaperoned 20 business students from Peking University to meet Warren Buffett in Omaha. This was the first group from Peking University to ever meet with Mr. Buffett – and only the second school ever from China. It turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime trip, an investment pilgrimage of sorts. In the following […]