Audrey Li + more things

1 minutes estimated reading time

My friend and former colleague Audrey Li wrote a great rambling essay. Audrey’s family live in a small town / village in Sichuan province. Sichuan is in the west of China. The essay covers WeChat, payments, crime and the party’s fight against pollution. WeChat scams are surprisingly common for an authoritarian regime that surveils everything. Although Audrey’s Mum seems to have a similar level of technology literacy to my Mum and Dad, I am surprised she uses mobile payments. The battle against pollution has hard costs, which Audrey Li goes into – Smart Phone, No-cash Society, and Jobless — A Short Conversation with My Mother

Line loses users in 3 of its most important countries – interesting changes in Taiwan, Indonesia and Thailand. I wonder what has eaten into LINE’s market share outside Japan? Maybe LINE has to provide a more fully featured experience like LINE Japan

Dissecting the Jimmy Choo Michael Kors Deal | News & Analysis | BoF“I think Michael Kors is trying to build up a portfolio of accessible luxury brands. This development strategy is very similar to the one of Coach, rather than to LVMH and Kering which are focused on true luxury brands. Moreover LVMH and Kering are at a more advanced stage of development: they already control dozens of brands and have central structure to exploit synergies among them,” adds Mario Ortelli, European luxury goods analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein – interesting that Jimmy Choo is now accessible luxury. More luxury orientated content here.

Is Beijing getting serious about selling off state firms? | SCMP – Tencent and Alibaba buying into Unicom could be an interesting dynamic. The big would be around the extra power these groups would get. I could see China going the other way greater state enterprises rather than market liberalisation

Kaspersky’s stellar antivirus finally goes free | PCWorld – feature limited but powerful