Uber spent $2B fighting with Chinese DidiChuxing. Adidas has been fighting Chinese Li-Ning and Anta for decades. And Apple is now struggling against multiple rising Chinese competitors,(Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, etc.). One thing you can always count on in China: A successful international company will inspire serious domestic competitors. So why doesn’t Starbucks have a serious […]
When bike-sharing first emerged, it was proclaimed to be the newest frontier of China’s sharing economy. And following the big fight between Uber China and Didi, it was quickly compared to ride-sharing. But there’s a problem. Bike-sharing is not really sharing. It is not part of the sharing economy. Bike-sharing does not have a network effect (yet). […]
There has been a lot of soul-searching by entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and Internet companies about what has gone wrong in Chinese digital health. Thousands of digital health companies have been launched and funded in recent years but there have been few, if any, big successes. However, if the past few years were overly optimistic, I […]
Much of the Wall Street discussion about Starbucks in China seems to fall into two main groups. The bulls talk about the big China consumer trend and the increases in Mainland outlets. The bears (or the less bullish) mostly point to slowing same store growth (about 5%) and the high PE multiple. I think both […]
H&M and Zara are two companies I pay a lot of attention to in China. They have great business models. Fast fashion is really impressive in general. They are popular with Chinese consumers. They are both following market leader Uniqlo in terms of expansion into second and third tier cities. They seem to be growing […]
*The following is an excerpt from our One Hour China Consumer Book (which is available here.). In Part 1, I told about how Christie’s and Sotheby’s have been involved in Chinese art for decades – and have recently entered China directly. This puts them in basically the wild west of the art world. Part 1 […]