I think we are officially at the end of Phase I of China’s bike-sharing / bike-rental phenomenon. There are now a couple of clear leaders – Mobike and Ofo. The services are experiencing tons of daily usage by Chinese consumers, and growth is continuing rapidly. This is definitely not a fad. The economics of the […]
Hollywood studios have been coming to grips with the fact that China will soon be the world’s largest market for entertainment. Movies increasingly are co-produced by cash-rich Chinese moguls. Chinese stars are cast in supporting roles. And praise for Chinese culture is being randomly stuck into scripts. But Hollywood’s success in China is going to increasingly […]
I’ve done six years of teaching at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management in Beijing. I’ve now seen thousands of MBAs come and go. Some do a semester or a year here. Some do their entire MBA in China. And then they go off to various parts of the world. One question I get a lot […]
Hey, I was on CGTN Global Business on July 28, 2017. The discussion with Cheng Lei and Kitty Fok was about China tech vs. the West. The video is located at this link. Or try this one. Full video is here. .Cheers, Jeff
At the end of 2016, I started counting how many people on the Beijing subway were wearing sportswear. It looked like about 30% of commuting Chinese had started wearing some type of sweats or other athletic gear. And if I just counted the running shoes, it was above 50%. This was kind of confusing. Somehow […]
Haier’s acquisition of GE Appliances in mid-2016 resulted in the usual stories about Chinese outbound M&A – and about China’s global ambitions. Such foreign acquisitions are almost always regarded as a type of ambition or strength. Chinese companies are going global! But sometimes such acquisitions can be a type of surrender, an acceptance that there […]
It’s been about a year since Apple’s $1B 2016 investment in Didi Chuxing. At the time, there was a lot of discussion about the rationale for the deal. Would it garner goodwill with the Chinese government? Would it help Apple’s slowing sales in China? And so on. So what happened? It doesn’t look the deal […]
I write one article per week and one book per year. That’s my schedule. And I am increasingly worried this is making me stupid. I work in investments, a field in which a lot of focus is on why people make mistakes. This is basically because to make money you need to be right (i.e,. […]
*The following is an excerpt from the One Hour China Book, for which a new 2017 version is available here. “China Vanke is a real estate company that has no equivalent in the West. The company’s revenues are greater than the top four American real estate developers combined. It has built more apartments than any […]
In a previous article, I laid out some basic theory for how platform businesses compete (you can read here). Based on this thinking, I think Airbnb should do 6 things differently than Uber in China.: #1: Airbnb will need to crack the code for Chinese home-sharing. Unlike in ride-sharing and taxi-hailing, the right services and […]