Influx Insights Tag Feed: china

reality check- china

Influx Insights — 2008-08-04T16:40:28Z

The Economist in it's usual style, had a great piece in last week's issue on the current state of America, suggesting that the country can emerge from the current economic malaise, stronger, if it does certain things right.

One real highlight of the piece was a great dose of reality concerning China.

"...even at its present growth rate, China’s GDP will take a quarter of a century to catch up with America’s; and the internal tensions that China’s rapidly changing economy has caused may well lead it to stumble before then."

With the upcoming Olympics, it will be clear that China is presenting itself as the leader on the global stage, while the real facts suggest it still has some way to go.

Posted by Ed Cotton

china's megacities

Influx Insights — 2008-07-18T19:36:00Z

The latest McKinsey Quarterly is a special China edition.

It has some great articles including a piece on the future of China's cities. The scale of here is quite incredible- McKinsey's Global Institute predicts that if country trends continue China's cities by 2025 will break down into the following sizes;

Mega- 10 million +

120

Big- 5-10 million

111

Midsize-0.5 mllion-1.5 million

311

Small-.5-1.1.5 million

228

Big Town- Less than 500k

156

The increase in the urban population will be 325 million, including 230 million migrants. Obviously, this will it not be without problems as land is taken to build these things, but the idea that one country will have over 100 cities with a population of over 10 million each is quite staggering.

Posted by Ed Cotton

china-growth failed to meet ambition

Influx Insights — 2008-06-19T10:09:15Z

The National has an amazing story about the South China Mall.

It was planned to be the world's largest and it now sits under-used (planned to house 1,500 stores and currently has just 12), the victim of a dream that failed to materialize.

Many speculators had big plans for China and wanted to capitalize on the supposed massive growth of the new middle class. Sadly, this growth didn't happen fast enough to propel this new mall to greatness.

It's perhaps a lesson that shows just how easy it is to get carried away with projections of potential and suggests that China's amazing growth can continue for ever.

"On a recent Friday afternoon, an amusement-park employee, slouched in a forsaken ticket booth, tried to kill time by making origami. Another worker slept, with perfect impunity, on a table. In front of the haunted house attraction, one attendant was doing hand-stands while two others looked blankly on.

There was nothing else to do, because the South China Mall, which opened with great fanfare in 2005, is not just the world’s largest. With fewer than a dozen stores scattered through a space designed to house 1,500, it is also the world’s emptiest – a dusty, decrepit complex of buildings marked by peeling paint, dead light bulbs, and dismembered mannequins.

“They set out to be the biggest, and hoped that being the biggest would be the attracting factor,” says David Hand, a retail analyst at Jones Lang LaSalle in Beijing, who has followed the project. “It hasn’t delivered.”

The world has plenty of empty malls; there’s even an American website, deadmalls.com, where connoisseurs of desolation post photos and reminiscences of the once-great, now-gutted places where they spent the Saturday afternoons of their youth. What sets the South China Mall apart from the rest, besides its mind-numbing size, is that it never went into decline. The tenants didn’t jump ship; they never even came on board. The mall entered the world pre-ruined, as if its developers had deliberately created an attraction for people with a taste for abandonment and decay. It is a spectacular real-estate failure – but it is also, as I saw when I spent two days exploring the site in May, a strangely beautiful monument to the big dreams that China inspires."

It's a strange coincidence that the story appears in a Dubai based publication- a country that has pushed development to the limits in the hope of becoming THE new tourist destination.

This story came from the amazing BLDGB blog, who has its own post on this incredible story.

Posted by Ed Cotton

mcdonald's branded jeans

Influx Insights — 2007-10-02T23:50:25Z

McDonald's Chinese workers get their own branded jeans.

Via McChronicles.

Posted by Ed Cotton

forget lovemarks, it's all about trustmarks

Influx Insights — 2007-08-21T09:20:10Z

In their original incarnation, brands were signifiers and guarantees of quality, something consumers could rely and depend upon.

In the later part of the C20th, two forces emerged that changed branding.

The first was the drive by marketing experts and ad agencies to suggest that brands needed emotional differentiation in a world where all brands were functionally similar.

Secondly, businesses discovered that a quick way to improve shareholder value was to strip out as much of the costs as possible.

We are now starting to feel the consequences of both these actions. We are starting to see a "brand vacuum" emerge, a fault line between what brands say they do and what they actually do. The rapid rise of the Internet is making it hard for brands to manage and control this ever widening chasm.

Recently, the notion of marketing experts that brands are at parity and that it’s therefore impossible to provide rational brand differentiation is being severely tested.

If the global factory, producing all our goods, China, can’t be trusted for safety, what does that say about the quality of the brands produced there?

What If airlines can no longer guarantee that their planes fly on time?

How about if banks can’t guarantee that their customers will be able to withdraw funds from ATMs?

We’ve got so enamored with the development of emotional connections and business strategists have driven down costs to such a point that brand trust, the fundamental platform for brands has been eroded.

While brand experts may still wax lyrical about Lovemarks and emotional bonds, isn’t it time to go back to basics?

I don’t think you can become a Lovemark without being a Trustmark first.

Agencies may hate me for saying it, but the rational has just suddenly taken on a whole new level of importance.

For brands, proof has now become the order of the day.

Posted by Ed Cotton

see china through manufactured landscapes

Influx Insights — 2007-08-19T14:55:38Z

The great Core 77 has a chat with photographer Edward Burtynsky and the film maker Jennifer Baichwal who made Manufactured Landscapes, the film about Burynsky's work and his recent trip to China.

There is no film that quite captures the contemporary scale of China like Manufactured Landscapes.

The challenge of capturing a photographer known for his large scale works and blending it into a film narrative is difficult, but in this case, it's really nicely put together.

If you want to see what's happening in China, Manufactured Landscapes takes you inside one of the biggest human transformations in history. The film shows Burtynsky pushing himself and his Chinese handlers to get the shots that tell the story and it's a story of Old China being pushed aside for New China.

What's also remarkable is quite how low-tech everything is; this is a human powered revolution. The film shows China's labor advantage, so much so, that mundane tasks done by machines in the West, are done by people in China.

One amazing and scary example of this is the recycling of components found in circuit boards which is perfomed by 1000s of "mom & pop" operators doing it.

This film is quite remarkable and well worth capturing on the big screen if you can.

Posted by Ed Cotton

crocs and china's blog reading factory owners

Influx Insights — 2007-07-21T13:18:47Z

Crocs have been a fashionable thing to write about recently,I wrote a post a few days ago, Rob Walker wrote his Consumed column about them, so I am sure people are sick of hearing about the ugliest brand of shoes in the world.

However, this isn't really about Crocs, instead it's about an email I recieved yesterday from China.

Here it is in full, nothing edited, formated or changed.

'Hello,friend

We are china supplier .we sell a lot of goods.If u need crocs,we have real anc copy beach style now.
Real 13$ each with shipped,minimum 100 pair.copy beach 10$ each wit shipped.
Real size and color:
Man size:us 7-11 uk size 6-10
color:black ,army green
women size us 5.5-8.5 uk size 2.5-6.5
color:amethyst,black ,red.pink ,yellow.army green.

I send to u copy crocs beach style stock list.u can see.if u want order copy too.u can let me know.

If u sell crocs.maybe u will need charms too.we have factory make charms.minmum 5000,price is 0.15$ each with shipped.( steel need more money 0.18$ each with shipped).
I send to u charms stock list ,u can see them.
Hope we can do business and I can become your supplier.we have a lot of another big brand shirt shoes bags jeans.if u need,i will let u know
I am waiting for your reply!"

This is not a joke about English usage, instead it tells us some interesting things.

1. The massive competitive pressure that the Chinese suppliers face- they are looking for orders from anywhere

2. The global power of blogs

3. The threat to brands from counterfeits

I wonder if I will be recieving an email from Crocs tomorrow?

Posted by Ed Cotton

cultural chasms

Influx Insights — 2007-07-12T12:37:50Z

Some interesting research from the University of Chicago on cultural differences.

Asia thinks about "we" and America thinks about "I".

"Keysar believes the Chinese students had an easier time understanding the director’s perspective because they come from a more collectivist society than their US counterparts. He speculates, for example, that compared with children in China, youngsters in the US are more likely to feel that it is "all about them".

In another example, he describes how a Texas corporation "aiming to improve productivity, told its employees to look in the mirror and say 'I am beautiful' 100 times before coming to work. In contrast, a Japanese supermarket instructed its employees to begin their day by telling each other 'you are beautiful'."

Posted by Ed Cotton

environmental problems a threat?...

Influx Insights — 2007-07-10T10:21:49Z

...it actually wasn't meant rhetorically in a recent survey by the Pew Center in Washington.

The conclusion was that there is a 14% increase in the proportion of Americans who say environmental problems are indeed a major global problem (23% in 2002 to 37% in 2007).

U.S. concern is low when looking at other advanced industrial countries, especially since we're seen by 34 of 37 countries surveyed as “hurting the world’s environment the most,” but the level of increase is still comparable.

Since the environment has been such a hot topic recently, perhaps the 2002 numbers tell more of a story. For example, even though China’s concern only rose 1% since 2002, 69% of Chinese people were concerned about the environment that year. This was the highest proportion of concern of any country in 2002 except for South Korea (73%), and Chinese citizens were three times more concerned than Americans that year.

There is evidence that China's leaders are catching up to the concerns of its people, even if only as a result of outside forces, but environmental initiatives are continuously canceled out by colossal economic plans.

For instance, new vehicle-emissions regulations are in the works, but they cannot match the exceptional rate of growth in the number of cars (projected to surpass the U.S. at 130 million vehicles by 2020), due to a policy to promote the domestic car industry.

So when will the U.S. approach the higher echelons of concern, if ever?
Hopefully our 14% increase signifies something bigger: that the level of concern in a country won’t always have to correspond with its level of pollution.

Posted by katie facada

checking china

Influx Insights — 2007-06-17T20:54:34Z

Almost overnight, Chinese goods have crept into our lives, so much so, we’ve become dependent on them.

It’s likely consumers used to believe big brands who manufacture in China and those retailers importing from China, operated some kind of quality checks. We also probably never thought of China as a place that manufacturers our food and health products.

However, the recent pet food contamination highlights the deficiency in safety control that exist in the system. The pet food problem impacted major brands and was responsible for killing as many as 4,000 American pets.

Then last week, there was another scandal, with the news about Chinese slaves. Although they were not directly involved in manufacturing goods for Western consumption, the news is forcing people to look at the working conditions in China once again.

The pet food issue is forcing China to take food safety seriously, but it’s a large country with millions of manufacturing centers, it’s going to be tough to control. The safety issue already seems to have gone beyond per food with other Asian countries having problems from tainted Chinese food destined for human consumption.

On the issue of working conditions, most US companies already audit their suppliers, but the deficiencies in these audits have been exposed by Business Week.

The recent slavery issue is likely to ignite the efforts of various Western NGOS who want governments to put more pressure on China to improve labor rights. They are likely to be stepping-up their efforts prior to the Beijing Olympics.

Obviously, the safety of food, health and beauty products is of prime importance to consumers. This month, a poll conducted by Harris found 86% of consumers were somewhat and seriously concerned about product recalls.

Influx believes consumers will now spend more time checking the source of the food and health products and will expect retailers and brands to be doing the same.

For industry, there’s no alternative, China has become the world’s factory.

All it can do is bring in its own safety checks and hope the Chinese government does the same.

Posted by Ed Cotton