Hello from Peking University, It has been a whirlwind of meetings and travel this month. I now call visiting three countries in a week a “triple”. There have been some interesting China business events recently, especially the United Airlines incident. Below are my comments on that – and my favorite China articles and books for […]
The “30M Chinese live in caves” statistic keeps getting repeated. And from relatively reputable sources – including the LA Times, the NY Daily News and Business Insider. Some reports even claim up to 70M people live in caves in China. Certainly many people in Shaanxi do have cave houses, as shown in the Shaanxi picture […]
So Yum! China has been spun-off. A reasonable move that gave them increased owner/management focus. It also gave some activist hedge funds a nice return. And the new spun-off Yum! China entity has released its first 10-Q, which was some interesting reading. But there are now some important challenges going forward. These are widely discussed […]
It was the 2008 melamine baby powder scandal that finally made food safety a national priority in China. And the 2016 vaccine scandal may be what similarly finally wakes Chinese consumers up to the issue of drug safety. Unfortunately, sick newborns may again be the mobilizing image. Drug scandals have been happening in China for […]
Question: What do you get when you put the world’s biggest smokers in the world’s most polluted cities – and then wait for +20 years? Answer: You get approximately 20M super-smoking Chinese men. A unique population that has likely inhaled more carcinogens than any other human beings alive. And as they are almost all men, […]
Hospitals are an exception to the China success story. The private ones are still mostly small and frequently distrusted. The public ones are more trusted but can often be like time traveling back to 1990. While more trusted in terms of actual care, they are operationally frustrating for patients and financially difficult for doctors and […]
In the past year, SF Express, STO, YTO, and the other China express delivery giants have all hit the accelerator. Faced with mounting competitive threats, express delivery in the PRC has morphed into an arms race in capabilities and capital. In Part 1, I explained what I think is behind the recent acceleration. In this […]
AB-InBev has closed their $104B mega-acquisition of SABMiller. As part of this, they agreed to sell SAB’s 49% stake in Snow beer . This was a preemptive move to get Chinese regulatory approval. As a result, quasi-SOE CR Snow will now become 100% state-owned (by China Resources Enterprise). This is a real shame. Because lost […]
This spring, the video of bloodied David Dao being dragged down the aisle of a United Airlines flight went global. It became news everywhere but it was the reaction in China that was probably the most surprising for United Airlines. There are lots of opinions as to why the Chinese reaction was so strong – […]
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 […]