This is Part 2 of my favorite business books. Plus some fun stuff from around Rio de Janeiro. Youtube link is here. Part 1 is here. —— I write and speak about digital China and Asia’s latest tech trends. Music is Longing by Joakim Karud http://youtube.com/joakimkarud
Digital China has arrived. It has unicorns, huge market opportunities and a pervasive cultural impact. Everything is now at world-class scale. Unfortunately, the distorting impact of hot money and hype has also scaled up. And this appears to be increasing. Ride-sharing was the first big escalation in venture-type behavior. In 2015-16, in both China and […]
In Part 1, I argued that Starbucks China most interesting competitor is not Luckin Coffee. It is HeyTea, an upscale Starbucks-type business focused on tea (something Chinese consumers really, really like). And to their credit, HeyTea appears to be mostly focusing not on digital (or financial engineering) but on product development and continually thrilling their […]
This is Part 2 of 3 on my visit to the 2019 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Part 1 is here. I got to the CHI Health arena in downtown Omaha at 5am. Yes, this was a bit crazy. But last year, I went with my parents and we got there around 7am, basically when the […]
The 2019 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha was awesome. As always. But there was a very conspicuous absence of visitors from China this year. The decrease from last year was unmistakable. So what happened? In 2018, the Berkshire event was likely the most popular “China event” in the USA.. It was crazy. Of the […]
Hey, I had a great time at Berkshire Hathaway 2019 and got to be on the US-China forum again. Great fun.Here is the link. Just look for the US-China forum. Cheers, jeff
The Luckin Coffee SEC filing is out. So we can finally see their numbers. This is Part 2 of what I think is being misunderstood about Luckin. Part 1 is here. #5: Luckin is not really about increasing mass-market coffee consumption in China. Luckin is engaged in a Herculean effort to get Chinese to drink […]
So Luckin has filed for an IPO and we finally got to see their numbers. And yes, there are red flags all over the place. Big operating losses, funky corporate structures, speculative revenue growth and so on. And this is not uncommon in a tech / internet ipo. But I don’t recall ever seeing this […]
我始终认为，新零售业比所有人在谈论的超级市场、送货员和便利店要大得多。它并不只是魔镜（magic mirror）、机器人服务员和人脸识别支付等炫酷的新工具。虽然，这些工具都很有意思。
In Part 1 of my visit to the JD-Qumei furniture store in Beijing, I laid out a bit of theory about furniture retail stores. They have some nice dynamics and some limitations. And that is mostly what is happening on the second floor of the store I visited. The First Floor: Where JD and QuMei […]
