I had a fascinating discussion with He Xiaodong of JD. He is the head of Deep Learning, NLP and the Speech Lab. And the Deputy Managing Director of JD AI Research. I did a podcast about this called Products with Personalities (Podcast 31) but I wanted to post some of his slides from our talk. […]
There was an interesting report about China ecommerce trends released by Coresight Research, which specializes in retail meets tech consulting. It’s run by Deborah Weinswig, who I’ve crossed paths with a few times in the last couple of years. I find their research to be very data-driven and generally close to my own thinking. So […]
In this podcast, Jeffrey Towson interviews He Xiaodong, the Vice President of JD.com’s Cloud & AI division, about conversational AI. They discuss how conversational AI is evolving from chatbots to intelligent assistants with personalities. For example, Xiaodong explains how JD’s Smart Customer Service has been designed to have the personality of a young woman, in order to better connect with its customers.
A couple of topics for today’s lesson / update. Why Steve Jobs Chose China for the Assembly of the iPhone In my One Hour China book, I included the following bit about Steve Jobs and China: “There is a great story about Steve Jobs freaking out about six weeks before the first iPhone was released. […]
The big digital China / Asia news this week was the expansion of the US entity list ban to include TSMC. In theory, Huawei cannot get advanced semiconductors from American companies directly or by having them manufactured with American equipment at companies such as TSMC.It’s a big deal.This was the political bombshell everyone was waiting […]
In this podcast, Jeffrey Towson discusses who should buy Luckin Coffee, following the company’s recent accounting scandal. He considers potential buyers such as Starbucks, Alibaba, and HeyTea. For example, Starbucks could benefit from Luckin’s strong presence in China, while Alibaba could use Luckin’s technology to expand its own coffee business.
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 […]
In this podcast, Jeffrey Towson discusses how Meituan can compete with Alibaba in the Chinese services marketplace. He considers factors such as geographic expansion, focus on transportation or hospitality services, and ancillary opportunities such as financial services or cloud services. For example, Meituan could expand into new markets, such as Southeast Asia, or it could focus on its core strengths, such as food delivery and ride-hailing.
Most of this course has been about strategy. Well, the intersection of strategy and digital. Basically, Michael Porter meets Jack Ma. But an important part of the executive tool kit is M&A. If you’re going to run a company or be a senior manager, you have to know how to buy other companies. You have […]