In this podcast, Jeffrey Towson interviews the Vice President of Cloud & AI at JD.com about how AI is transforming the fashion industry. They discuss three key areas where AI is having an impact: personalization, supply chain management, and product development. For example, AI can be used to recommend products to customers based on their past purchases, track inventory levels and optimize shipping routes, and design new products that are more likely to appeal to consumers.
In this podcast, Jeffrey Towson discusses how big Ant Financial, the financial arm of Alibaba, could become. He considers factors such as its current size, its growth rate, and its plans for expansion. For example, Ant Financial is already the world’s largest mobile payments company, and it is growing at a rapid pace.
In Part 1 (From Big, Dumb Bureaucracies to Zero-Human Operations (pt 1 of 2), I made the following argument: In the industrial age, enterprises were built on the advantages of scale. Companies went from workshops and small factories to big factories capable of mass production. Superior scale gave companies multiple advantages, including cost efficiencies and […]
There was a good paper recently published by Martin Reeves and Raj Varadajaran of the Boston Consulting Group. The paper (When Resilience Is More Important Than Efficiency) touched on a lot of issues related to digital competition – but there was one chart that I thought really hit at the center of a lot of […]
Much of our discussion about digital platforms (Alibaba, Tencent, etc.) has been about their business models. And all their strengths, which are formidable. But I haven’t talked much about the experiences of the user groups on these platforms. What does this mean for merchants and brands selling on Alibaba? For restaurants on Meituan? For content […]
Jeffrey Towson, a China tech expert, believes that TikTok’s success is due to its addictiveness, ease of use, and highly shareable content. He also credits the app’s ability to tap into China’s growing digital consumer network.
In previous Daily Updates, I presented 4 slides that showed the evolution of Alibaba as a powerful marketplace platform. A 3 Slide Summary of Alibaba and Marketplace Platform Strategy (Daily Update, Jeff’s Asia Tech Class) Alibaba and the Power of Externalizing Capabilities (Daily Update – Jeff’s Asia Tech Class) In the first one, I argued […]
In this podcast episode, Jeffrey Towson discusses four options for how Huawei can respond to the US tech ban on its smartphone business. These options include fixing the supply chain, becoming a digital platform, ignoring Europe, and trying to build an anti-US alliance for smartphone operating systems. Towson argues that Huawei’s best option is to become a digital platform, as this would allow it to continue to innovate and grow its business even in the face of the US tech ban.
In this class, Jeffrey Towson discusses four options that Huawei could have taken to respond to the US tech ban. These options include fixing the supply chain and staying the course, becoming a digital platform, ignoring Europe and focusing mostly on China, and trying to build an anti-US alliance for smartphone operating systems. Towson argues that Huawei should have focused on becoming a digital platform, as this would have allowed the company to continue to innovate and grow.