Ni hao – this category features any blog posts that relate to the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese communist party, Chinese citizens, consumer behaviour, business, and Chinese business abroad.
It is likely the post will also in other categories too. For example a post about Tong Ren Tang might end up in the business section as well. Inevitably everything is inherently political in nature. At the moment, I don’t take suggestions for subject areas or comments on content for this category, it just isn’t worth the hassle.
Why have posts on China? I have been involved in projects there and had Chinese clients. China has some interesting things happening in art, advertising, architecture, design and manufacturing. I have managed to experience some great and not so great aspects of the country and its businesses.
Opinions have been managed by the omnipresent party and this has affected consumer behaviour. Lotte was boycotted and harassed out of the country. Toyota and Honda cars occasionally go through damage by consumer action during particularly high tensions with Japan.
I put stuff here to allow readers to make up their own minds about the PRC. The size of the place makes things complicated and the only constants are change, death, taxes and the party. Things get even more complicated on the global stage.
The unique nature of the Chinese internet and sheltered business sectors means that interesting Galapagos syndrome type things happen.
I have separate sections for Taiwan and Hong Kong, for posts that are specific to them.
Chinese New Year or CNY 2023 in online shorthand meant that for many people through Asia and beyond we are now in the year of the rabbit. You may see CNY 2023 also called lunar new year or ‘spring festival’. This post is later than I usually do for Chinese New Year, but that delay allowed me to watch more adverts so that you didn’t have to.
Traits of Chinese New Year
The rabbit is one of 12 signs in the Chinese zodiac. During the festival a number of things happen:
Family members try to gather and visit wider family members. In mainland China, this triggers the world’s largest internal migration of people over a three week period. An article by Bloomberg estimated that mainland Chinese people will have made more than 520 million trips within the country by road, rail, water or air in the first 13 days of the new year
People stay up late together, this apparently helps to give longevity to your parents
There is a corresponding rise in food purchases, alcohol and other ancillary items. Depending where you are families may make dumplings together or toss bowls of noodles together in order to gain good fortune and prosperity
There is a tradition of buying new clothes. In Hong Kong, going to sleep in (new) red underwear is believed to give good luck. Having a red theme to clothes is supposed to help bring good fortune
Money. Money in currency and gold is gifted in red envelopes. Companies will pay their employees a lunar new year bonus, usually equivalent to one pay packet (a weeks wages, or a month’s salary was the norm in Hong Kong.) Bosses also give their employees a red envelope from their personal pocket.
There are media events. So in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia there is usually a ‘Chinese New Year’ song specially composed. Special films that are suitable for all age groups do well in the cinema such as Hong Kong’s ‘All’s Well that ends well’ series of movies
Consequently, from an advertising perspective this can be equivalent to Super Bowl Sunday in the United States or the Christmas season in the UK when brands drop their tent pole ad creative.
Ad dynamics
In general, the best adverts seem to come from Malaysia and Singapore rather than Hong Kong or China and CNY 2023 is no exception. Businesses that lean in particularly heavy to CNY 2023 advertising include telecoms companies, banks and financial services and health companies. Some FMCG brands also get involved, but that seems to be more sporadic in nature. Finally in CNY 2023, some sectors like airlines have more customers than they do available seats so there doesn’t seem to be a campaign by the likes of Cathay Pacific this year.
China
Apple
Apple puts on a film that showcases Chinese opera and tells an individual tale of persistence as part of its shot on an iPhone series of films.
https://youtu.be/HjHG5kzi85o
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola features a touching story about a family of rabbits celebrating lunar new year. I can’t embed here because Coca-Cola China seems to be using all YouTube’s copyright tools for some reason.
It apparently says:
Time will change, traditions will change, and the expectation of reunion will never change. A bowl of handmade dumplings evokes the taste of the New Year in memory. A can of Coca-Cola can fully release the beauty of reunion. The first words of reunion in everyone’s mouth are Coca-Cola® Cheers! Regardless of whether the dishes on the table this year are classic dishes or trendy New Year dishes, as long as they are paired with “Coca-Cola”, the magic of delicious food can be opened, and the whole family can welcome the new and beautiful “rabbit-morrow” together!
Translation by Hakumi Chan
Gucci
China is opening up and Gucci wants to get its share of revenge spending. Hence a lavish short film to celebrate the year of the Rabbit (and a platinum UnionPay card to buy it with).
Hong Kong
Asahi Dry
Japanese lager Asahi Super Dry put together this ad with surprising production values compared to other efforts in the market.
Malaysia
Bing Chilling
Bing Chilling is a local ice cream brand. It has an ear worm of a Chinese New Year song and manages to make the product fit naturally into the film – which is no mean feat.
https://youtu.be/vB633cGTP70
Khazanah Nasional
Khazanah Nasional Berhad (“Khazanah”) is the sovereign wealth fund of Malaysia. The film about a ‘leap of fortune’ is an apropos theme to the brand.
KitKat
To celebrate KitKat pink ice cream Nestle’s ice cream marketers commissioned an advert that put together a catchy song and campy outfitted young people to create CNY 2023 perfection.
Listerine
Listerine mouthwash captures the tension of a family photo orchestrated by a demanding Auntie.
Magnum
Magnum is a mobile gaming app, as a brand think of it as a Malaysian analogue to Foxy Bingo.
Mercedes Benz
Pure product porn with a flimsy plot line of a reunion for Chinese New Year.
Pepsi
Pepsi focuses on nostalgia with a slice of romance in its advert.
A second Pepsi film encourages consumers to finish their canned drinks rather than having multiple cans partly used – a common problem during lunar new year gatherings. Creatively, you can see the influence of Hong Kong television programmes on wider asian culture to this day.
Taylor’s University
Malaysia’s system which games access to public education to the benefit of the Malay ethnic group has fuelled demand for private universities at home and abroad. Taylor’s University is a private university based in Selangor. This seven minute film comes across as your usual tearjerker, but has a couple of twists in the plot to keep you guessing.
TuneTalk
Malaysian pre-paid mobile carrier TuneTalk focused on how broken friendships and relationships are healed as part of the process of coming together through CNY 2023. Alex and Cindy will be reunited!
Watsons
Hong Kong headquartered pharmacy retail chain wishes you a Happy Beautiful New Year for CNY 2023.
Singapore’s incumbent telecoms company brings back the rival, but related Ang and Huang families for their fourth outing in their annual series Chinese New Year advertisements.
Tiger beer
Singapore’s Tiger beer did this advert for its home market. It also did experiential activities that tied into the advert too. The agency who did it is called Le PUB – nominative determinism in action.
Wider diaspora
HSBC Canada (in partnership with the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco)
The case study speaks for itself and I can understand why it appeals to well heeled Vancouver residents who call Hong Kong home.
McDonalds US x Karen X Cheng
The US arm of McDonalds partnered with Karen X Cheng to create augmented reality based CNY 2023 with a QRcode type glyph on food packaging at participating restaurants.
China is no longer a good thing on your CV, part of this is down to ‘Brand China’. You are likely to be viewed negatively by peers and even family members at home. From the Chinese perspective, foreigners are now viewed with more suspicion and distaste as the government has fermented fear of foreign spies and nationalistic populism. I am sure that the Chinese government would see it as advantageous if locals had these jobs instead. A position in China might be a rear-guard action now while the future of the corporation that you work for will now be elsewhere in Southeast Asia
There are better opportunities elsewhere in South East Asia such as Singapore, Vietnam or even Indonesia. A lack of travel to China opened up the eyes of foreign c-suite members who have spent a good deal of time looking elsewhere. Even businesses like Apple are looking at their supply chain options
China is more expensive to live in. Costs had been shooting up in the years running up to COVID-19 and haven’t got any cheaper
Accessing timely, good quality healthcare is an issue
Effective tax has risen a lot. You will have to pay into local pensions that you will never be able to use. So you are paying more tax and living in a much more expensive country
The Chinese visa system is much more hassle filled
China’s preference for hostage diplomacy
International schools have to follow a Chinese curriculum due to changes in regulations. If you value your child’s education, you will no longer want them to go to school there
The businesses that made life more tolerable in China have been disappearing. I won’t list off the range of bars in restaurants, but also access to English language books, formerly through stores like The Book Worm in Beijing. The eco-system of businesses that supported expats living in China is rapidly disappearing even before COVID-19 hit
A progressively stricter and harder to crack version of the ‘Great Firewall’
RUSI put together a great presentation on the nature of illicit finance from the perspective of terrorism and terrorist states including Russia and the People’s Republic of China. The foundations of illicit finance seems to be the offshore financial structures that were build up by the United Kingdom in the post-war period to capture the EuroDollar market.
In some ways this lecture on Illicit finance felt very familiar. It is exactly the same structures that John Le Carre outlined in his post-cold war novel Single and Single. The nature of illicit finance was also covered in Michael Oswald’s documentary The Spider’s Web – Britain’s Second Empire. This linkage was not lost on the audience attending the talk.
The concerns about illicit finance now are because these structures are being used to attack democracies at their core and buy influence for hostile states such as Russia and China. It is like the west is slowly awakening from a slumber as its enemies try to slit their throat.
Riding the slow train in China | The Economist – As Mr Xi enters his second decade as supreme leader, his sternly paternalist version of Communist Party rule seeks to draw ever more legitimacy from the provision of customer-friendly public services, supplied via modern infrastructure. In the case of China’s railways, at least, that promise of order and efficiency has been kept.
Wintershall’s empty bank accounts expose plight of western companies still in Russia | Financial Times – “We helped create a very powerful and dangerous Russia without being cognisant of the risk,” he said, while acknowledging that the country had done its best to remedy this in the past 12 months. And he said BASF risked repeating its Russian mistake in China. “What I’m really surprised about, and almost upsets me, is that while this is all happening . . . BASF decides to invest €10bn in China,” he said, referring to a planned chemicals complex that will be the company’s largest ever foreign investment. “That’s the most upsetting part,” he said. “That we don’t learn from it.” – this quote from Thomas Schweppe of 7Square nails the problem neatly
Finance
Thousands of offshore companies with UK property still not stating real owners | Tax havens | The Guardian – wealthy businessmen, Gulf royalty and states such as China have legally bought up billions of pounds of mostly London property, often via jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and the Channel Islands. Stephen Abbott Pugh, head of technology for Open Ownership, a non-governmental organisation focused on beneficial ownership transparency, said the fact that so many of the offshore companies are declared as owned by other companies or trusts means “the public still aren’t able to easily discover the people behind those companies in many cases”. “With access to many European beneficial ownership registers being shut off following a 2022 court ruling, the Register of Overseas Entities shows how useful public data is for tracking how offshore money is used to buy assets,”
Health
The 1964 House Report on how smoking affected the health of Americans went around the world. Sales dropped 30 percent in a week, and then picked up back to normal after existing smokers addiction kicked in.
How Microsoft’s Stumbles Led to Its OpenAI Alliance — The Information – For more than a decade, Microsoft Research, the company’s in-house research group, has touted artificial intelligence breakthroughs such as translating speech to text and software that could understand human language or recognize objects in images. But the company’s effort to commercialize its AI research moved at more of a crawl – this was at the centre of Microsoft’s innovation narrative for the best part of two decades. It’s embarrassing
Inside the secret Facebook groups where women review men | Dazed – then there’s the whole other side of ‘Are We Dating The Same Guy’, which is a lot more ethically ambiguous. Is it ever OK to publicly share someone’s photos and private conversations without their consent? Or in other words, to ‘doxx’? There’s a clear power differential, but if genders were reversed and guys were exposing females to strangers on the internet, it’s unlikely we’d see the group in such a positive light. “If a boy posted me and people were writing ‘red flag’ in the comments, I would genuinely be quite hurt,” says Tara, 20. She notes how, sometimes, users make particularly unfair remarks: for example, they’ll lambast a date for having “shit chat”, or “[talking] like a 60-year-old dad”.
Getting Personal With State Propaganda – China Media Project – Nanchang Aviation University (南昌航空大学), located in China’s southern Jiangxi province, announced that it had launched the “Jiangxi International Communication Research Center” (江西国际传播研究中心) in cooperation with the China Media Group, the state media conglomerate formed in 2018 directly under the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department. According to coverage by China Education Daily, a newspaper directly under the Ministry of Education, the new center is an experiment in combining central CCP media and universities (央媒+高校) to carry out international communication by using the “overseas student resources” (留学生资源) of the university.
Is nepotism really that bad? | LinkedIn – Jed Hallam wrote an essay on nepotism and the effects that he perceives it as having on inequality. Jed tries to steer a line on nepotism somewhere between recognising that the people may have an interest and talent, whilst pointing out inequality related issues derived from nepotism. Nepotism itself is widespread, whether its impact is small or large.
Jed is concerned that nepotism can actively remove opportunities for less conventional candidates that may do better if assessed solely in merit.
Social, cultural and economic barriers
Even if nepotism disappeared, our unconscious desire to hire people more like us, can mean that candidates face challenges in social, cultural and economic realms. I don’t drink, don’t have an interest in rugby union or football. I knew no one down here and sold my car to pay my first month’s rent when I moved to London. The analogy of a viking burning his boat behind him would be apt. I didn’t, and couldn’t if I wanted to, move to London earlier than my late 20s. I had to put myself through university and build up a modest amount of money to back myself as my parents didn’t have any.
One aspect of Jed’s essay on nepotism particularly surprised me:
“the proportion of people from working-class backgrounds operating in the creative industries has more than halved since the 1970s–falling from 16.4 percent to just 7.9 percent”
The problem with nepotism is that its hard to define and work out the difference between good and bad nepotism. For instance:
I line managed some one who had gone to Harrow and had found it harder to get into a creative agency because he was considered to be too posh by interviewees. He since went on to work successfully for other agencies, inhouse at a well loved brand and now runs his own shop
Would someone following on into the family profession be a case of nepotism? A classic example from the creative industry would be Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk, whose father is disco producer ‘Daniel Vangarde’ aka Daniel Bangalter. One could imagine how being exposed to music and a studio environment from an early age made Thomas the kind of producer he was.
Or the Arnault children taking roles in LVMH? European business often rely on intergenerational family ownership and management
Nepotism is more obvious when you have events like the recent US college scandal. The problem with debate about any hot subject like nepotism is the lack of room for nuance and good judgement. A second aspect to it is making people feel like victims of nepotism and inequality, rather than encouraging striving. Admittedly that is even made harder to do when inequality that underpins nepotism has become much more extreme.
People look for easy solves and clear lines for issues like nepotism, when what we really need are better decision making and good judgement.
Nepotism unresolved
There will always be people who feel hard done by, it wasn’t them it was X external factor. Sometimes it isn’t your time, or you didn’t make clear how good you were. Equal opportunity doesn’t equate to equal outcomes, the case in point that nepotism can learn from is currently going through the US Supreme Court. In an age of algorithmically filtered CVs I can see nepotism become attenuated rather than resolved.
V Shanshan, “Why are you Forcing me to Embrace Solidarity?” – Reading the China Dream – Weibo post from someone whose uncle had died from complications from covid the previous day, writing to express his anger and bitterness at the hectoring calls in China’s official media to “come together” and “look to the future” as China decides to live—and die—with covid. That such calls ring hollow for many Chinese makes perfect sense, since China’s mighty messaging machine seems to have turned on a dime, suddenly arguing that Omicron is no big deal and that “everyone is responsible for their own health” after insisting for years that the virus is deadly and that collective behavior was the only way to control it
A Place for Fire – The Paris Review – the primal draw of fire in the home. This reminded me of the central role of the turf and wood fuelled range in the Irish farmhouse where I spent a good deal of my childhood
Project MUSE – The Surge of Nationalist Sentiment among Chinese Youth during the COVID-19 Pandemic – Since 2012, Beijing has been promoting a strain of populist nationalism which underscores both the institutional superiority of the ruling party and the cultural superiority of being Chinese. At the international level, however, the image of both the regime and the Chinese has been marred due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in Wuhan (December 2019–January 2020). This study examines the extent and the form that the surge in nationalist sentiment of Chinese young people has taken during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a questionnaire survey of 1,200 students from a sample of 20 colleges/universities in China (June–July 2020), this study shows that the respondents express high satisfaction with the state’s performance in tackling the pandemic, and that there is a substantial surge of nationalist sentiment with a high level of hostility towards other nations (e.g. the United States). Such nationalist sentiment, however, is found to express a bifurcated pattern in that young Chinese also tend to embrace the opportunity to work and study in the Western societies they ostensibly dislike – yeah, is it smart to let them in though, given Chinese laws obligating them to cooperate with the MSS if requested?
Project MUSE – Living with the State-Led Order: Practical Acceptance and Unawareness of the Chinese Middle Class – China’s expanding middle class is often found to support the regime and lack democratic aspirations. We find that one section of the middle class depends upon the state for jobs and other material benefits, and the other works for the private and foreign sectors of the country’s economy. Once separated as such, we found that the non-state middle class clearly shows lower support for the regime. Furthermore, unlike the state middle class, which registers lower democratic support, the non-state middle class shows a similar level of democratic support as other social classes. In general, however, while only pragmatically accepting the current order, both middle class groups nonetheless appear lacking practical knowledge and understanding of liberal democratic institutions such as free media and multiparty elections. The unforthcoming attitudes toward democracy might also derive from a general sense of fearing the loss of order and the other related uncertainties
Economics
The true priorities of the global elite – by Judd Legum – The New York Times’ Peter Goodman, author of “Davos Man” — a blistering criticism of the WEF and its neoliberal ideology — recently offered this brief description: The World Economic Forum is not a secret government or organized conspiracy. It is a giant business meeting, a chance for the heads of multinational oil giants to sit opposite Persian Gulf potentates — fronted by the performance art of earnest panel discussions aimed at solving the problems of the day. More than anything, Davos is a prophylactic against change, an elaborate reinforcement of the status quo served up as the pursuit of human progress. Tuesday’s WEF program included a panel with Senators Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV). The pair shared an on-stage high-five in celebration of the filibuster, which has been used to block increases in the minimum wage, protections for voting rights, and efforts to maintain access to reproductive health care.
German tank manufacturer’s warning puts pressure on Ukraine’s allies | Ukraine | The Guardian – Battle tanks from German industrial reserves wanted by Ukraine will not be ready to be delivered until 2024, the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall has warned, increasing pressure on Nato allies to support Ukraine with armoured vehicles in active service instead, ahead of a key meeting this week.“Even if the decision to send our Leopard tanks to Kyiv came tomorrow, the delivery would take until the start of next year,” Rheinmetall’s chief executive, Armin Papperger, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. Rheinmetall, which manufactures the battle vehicle’s gun, has 22 Leopard 2 and 88 older Leopard 1 tanks in its stocks. Getting the Leopard tanks ready for battle, however, would take several months and cost hundreds of millions of euros the company could not put up until the order was confirmed
Macau gaming: Chau’s jail term warns punters and investors alike | Financial Times – It is worthwhile considering this in part of the wider picture of how China is trying deal with capital flight. It also chimes with efforts to move Hong Kong from being about ‘wealth management’ i.e. schemes to allow capital flight out of the mainland to the west to trying to pull in western money to invest in Chinese businesses. Macau was part of that process too.
Expect a clampdown on insurance policy sales people. At the moment a lot of them sell these things via WeChat with a view to providing financial services to mainlanders in a similar way to what daigou do with luxury goods from abroad. I know work at home mums that do this for Prudential as a side hustle
Auction houses have expanded like crazy in Hong Kong during the pandemic and I would expect the authorities to look at how they can shut this off or use to only import items into China rather than having them leave again. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are strongly encouraged to shutdown in Hong Kong and up up in Sanya on Hainan island instead so they stay inside the yuan firewall
Expect pressure on foreign banks on wealth management / capital flight vehicles. There maybe some latitude through mainland banks where the government can monitor the flow through back-end access into their systems
Ultimately, Singapore will be the new Hong Kong – which is happening already due to ‘run culture’ and a plethora of wealth management and family office services being provided.
Hong Kong’s financial hub is at a crossroads | Financial Times – Look for a senior job in Hong Kong these days on LinkedIn and you’re unlikely to find any openings unless you’re a speaker of Cantonese or Mandarin, or both. “That’s a big change,” confides a longtime British expat in the territory. “It’s understandable. But it’s a big change.” The evolving jobs market is just one of the visible signs of the tilt to mainland China that promises to redefine Hong Kong’s role as a global financial centre. Beijing’s growing influence on the former British colony — evident in four years of security crackdowns and tough Covid lockdowns — has raised existential questions about the sustainability of the territory’s role as Asia’s unparalleled bridgehead to global finance – yeah soon even the finance bros will go
Japan was the future but it’s stuck in the past – BBC News – Japan had emerged from the destruction of World War Two and conquered global manufacturing. The money poured back into the country, driving a property boom where people bought anything they could get their hands on, even chunks of forest. By the mid-1980s, the joke was that the grounds of the imperial palace in Tokyo were worth the same as all of California. The Japanese call it the “Baburu Jidai” or the bubble era. Then in 1991 the bubble burst. The Tokyo stock market collapsed. Property prices fell off a cliff. They are yet to recover. A friend was recently negotiating to buy several hectares of forest. The owner wanted $20 per square metre. “I told him forest land is only worth $2 a square metre,” my friend said. “But he insisted he needed $20 a square metre, because that’s what he’d paid for it in the 1970s.” Think of Japan’s sleek bullet trains, or Toyota’s “just-in-time” marvel of assembly-line manufacturing – and you could be forgiven for thinking Japan is a poster child for efficiency. It is not. Rather the bureaucracy can be terrifying, while huge amounts of public money are spent on activities of dubious utility – this says more about the persons values than about Japan. Also coming from Britain’s public broadcast service, it is ironic that Japan is at the centre of many critical global supply chains and Britain is being stripped out of them. A bit of introspection is required
Luxury Brands Beware: Angered Chinese Tourists Are Avoiding Japan And South Korea | Jing Daily – South Korea issued yellow tags for China’s inbound travelers to wear at its airports, and Japan followed suit, giving red tags to passengers coming from the country. The initiative has elicited outrage online. On Weibo, the hashtag “Japan issues red tags to mark Chinese travelers” has gathered 200 million views, becoming the fourth most trending topic at one point. Many Chinese travelers complained that they not only had to pay for COVID tests and potential quarantines in subpar conditions upon entering South Korea but also had to wear a yellow tag on their necks to identify themselves as coming from China for special inspection at airports. The tags, along with South Korean reporters snapping photos at them, made them feel like they were criminals being transferred
Good to see that we’re finally beyond the 3D printing hype bubble and its true benefits can be appreciated. This article is a good run down of the pros and cons of 3D printing in an industrial setting. In some ways it reminds me of the ‘manufacturing cells’ concept were a computer controlled machine tool with switchable tool faces would do multiple jobs and process multiple types of products in small batches.
Not all manufacturing is true Fordian production lines. Just in the same way that digital printing has been good for small run books and catalogues or printing on demand; yet ‘traditional printing’ is still used for bigger print runs – additive manufacturing will be alongside traditional manufacturing processes.
Chinese Celebrities’ Political Signalling on Sina Weibo | The China Quarterly | Cambridge Core – Recent studies have revealed how the state disciplines and co-opts celebrities to promote patriotism, foster traditional values and spread political propaganda. However, how do celebrities adapt to the changing political environment? Focusing on political signalling on the social media platform Sina Weibo, we analyse a novel dataset and find that the vast majority of top celebrities repost from official accounts of government agencies and state media outlets, though there are variations. Younger celebrities with more followers tend to repost from official accounts more often. Celebrities from Taiwan tend to repost less than those from the mainland and Hong Kong, despite being subject to the same rules. However, the frequent political signalling by the most influential celebrities among younger generations suggests that the state has co-opted celebrity influence on social media to broadly promote its political objectives
Macs In the Enterprise: A Cisco Case Study – Creative Strategies – Despite extremely high desire from employees to use Macs (66% according to a study we did last year), most IT organizations keep the Mac users in their organization at arm’s length. Offering true platform of choice matters when it comes to employee experience and employee satisfaction with their workplace, tools, and IT departments. This is exactly what Cisco found when they studied internal employees. A Cisco report on IT satisfaction of employees found satisfaction to be significantly lower when employees were not offered their platform of choice in a laptop – this bullshit has been going on my entire career, HR departments are a major issue as well
CES 2023 marks the 25th year since I first started working in agency life. Back then I was working in what was the exciting world of technology. I had nascent internet clients, networking / telecoms clients and Palm, who were leaders in the personal digital assistant market. Things were just hinting at the convergence of the technology and consumer electronics world.
Like most trade shows CES 2023 works on two levels. The bit that’s in the media that helps people like me understand manufacturer led product and service trends. Some of the trends went well, like LCD televisions and some did badly like 3D television screens. The bit that wasn’t seen was the sales meetings that fuel much of the global trade in finished electronics products. 100s of billions of dollars in sales were agreed through CES Los Vegas each year and CES 2023 was likely to be similar to other years in this respect.
China at CES 2023
China had about half the companies that attended CES pre-COVID pandemic. This was a mix of:
Washington Entity list. Large technology players including DJI, ZTE and Huawei are barred from doing business with American partners. So turning up to CES 2023 would have a limited utility for them even if they were allowed to have a booth
COVID-disruption. Large swathes were locked down, something that the country has only recently opened up
Economic head winds at home
Finally, government focus on the right kind of business development with a tiered funding model
Bankers and experts said that the CSRC was trying to funnel money towards sectors it deemed strategically important as the country pushed for technological self-reliance and economic growth. The regulator’s move to refresh the listings guidance underscores Beijing’s efforts to make the country’s equity exchanges serve its national agenda, said analysts. “The Chinese government doesn’t want a market-based stock market,” said Larry Hu, an economist at Macquarie Group in Hong Kong. “It wants one that helps the authority carry out industry policy.”
A plethora of projector companies made a pitch to replace the TV set with 8K resolution projectors.
The physical nature of TV sets is considered to be a ‘problem’ that manufacturers are trying to solve. A second way to do this was through wireless technology. LG separated its TV set from its HDMI and other connectors, instead having the cables to go into a hub that then wirelessly connected to the TV.
If I was to make a guess as to why this was happening, I would partly credit the pandemic and the way some consumers looked to change their living space during that time. Another TV which seemed to capture lots of TV news overage of the show was the Displace wireless TV set. It completely dispensed with a power cable due to being powered by TV sized lithium batteries and was held up with a suction cup.
Descriptors used included comparisons to it being a ‘giant iPad’ which wasn’t really true as its not really a tablet computer. This probably says more about the iPad being co-opted as a media consumption device. Secondly, just because it grabs attention doesn’t mean that it has a consumer use case.
IoT (internet of things)
IoT is often called smart home or home automation. Like most technology ideas it actually goes back several decades. In the case of home automation, the pre-internet communications protocol was X10, invented by a Scottish technology start-up in the 1970s. My 1978, X10 enabled products were on sale in the Sears department store (then the US’ largest retailer) and Radio Shack (for UK people of a certain age: Tandy).
Use of IP protocol has allowed for much more functionality and use cases. It is even parodied with the Internet of Shit.
According to veteran analyst Tim Bajarin, a decade ago IoT the way we now think of it didn’t have its own section at CES, five years ago it suddenly did. CES 2023 didn’t necessarily present solutions to IoTs myriad of problems, such as cybersecurity and personal security.
It’s still a very important trend, despite the decline in Chinese vendors turning up with weird new products this year.
The underlying of technology has inspired new applications in
Health technology
Food technology
Sports technology
All of which now have their sections at CES 2023.
Health technology
Healthcare monitoring has been a big area of growth. The reasons for this are many-fold:
Consumers increased focus on their own health, from the quantified self to the rise of smart watches like the Apple Watch
Organisations like US healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente who have pioneered a focus on preventative health and maintenance rather than waiting for people to get sick
People are increasingly living with co-morbidities such as diabetes
You now have traditional big pharmacy companies like Abbott appearing at CES 2023 with their health monitoring solutions
This surge in healthcare technology has been enabled by smart sensors and machine learning powering hardware and software solutions enable it. Some technologies like accelerometers have moved along in leaps and bounds alongside other silicon MEMS chips. However as we have seen with high profile cases such as Theranos, there often isn’t the miraculous leaps forward in technology that we might expect in other areas due to the likes of Moore’s Law.
Some analysts have speculated that pet health and activity tracking will be the next growth areas after their humans have digitised their own health regimes.
Adaptive technology that could be considered to fit within the health technology space can reduce the cost of care in a similar way to self monitoring, or can be an exercise in ‘brand purpose’ like L’Oreal’s robotic lipstick applicator. In L’Oreal’s case, brand purpose and cynical PR stunt seem to be interchangeable.
For someone who grew up with personal stereos and iPods, I can understand how there would be a demand for a set of headphones that sit somewhere between the Apple AirPod and a hearing aid. Sennheiser have introduced the Conversation Clear Plus and Jabra have a similar offering.
Advertising technology
A good deal of hardware technology is supplied to the consumer on razor thin margins and innovation allows greater data collection. This has meant that ad technology was an area of discussion at CES 2023. Experian were there to sell products that allow advertisers to deal with ‘pesky’ issues like consumer privacy, regulatory requirements and data deprecation. Your internet connected TV and streaming hardware are target advertising platforms and are snitching on your viewing habits.
As someone who works in the advertising industry, I can understand the rationale; as a consumer I detest the invasion of my privacy.
Metaverse
The metaverse had its own sections and both hardware and software companies were noted as having some innovative products.
I think that there is a wider question over the health of the metaverse and related technologies such as Web 3.0 and VR. As CES was on, Microsoft got ready to shut down its virtual reality optimised social network Altspace which had a small but vibrant community on there.
We’re at least a decade away from the open VR web-like metaverse imagined by technologists and the financial downturn isn’t helping with this.
Some of the technology on show was also related to other trends such as the head-up displays rolling out on connected cars.
Automobiles
At the start of my career, car stereo head-units and DVD players may have got a look in at CES. For CES 2023, with the move towards electric vehicles, digital cockpits and a desire for more autonomous driving the car looks more like a computer system on four wheels.
Gains in autonomous vehicles have been modest and this was apparent in the mature GPS based tilling programming for John Deere tractors and the simple shuttle service between halls provided by Tesla.
The big thing this year was an upgradeable module to power the digital dashboard and in-car entertainment. This doesn’t sound much of an exciting product, until you realise that cars take longer to develop than gadgets and new cars can be relying on technology that is 10+ years old.
If nothing else upgradeability would solve issues with trying to source obsolete micro-processors for car manufacturers. The automotive sector is sufficiently important to CES that agricultural equipment and ride on lawn mower maker John Deere gave a keynote at the show.
CES 2023 Gadget Gap
The Wall Street Journal walk around highlighted a number of issues at CES 2023. It noted that new product companies in the hardware space were finding a lack of funding, COVID-related development, manufacturing and logistics issues; together with consumer demand challenges would be here for the long haul. They quote a 50 precent drop in venture capital funding.
This has implications for future years of the CES show. They even gave it a name the ‘Gadget Gap’.
A lack of focus
Reading this post on CES 2023, will make you aware of the lack of focus in the event. A good deal of CES is no longer products aimed a consumer end audience, the participation of Experian, John Deere and Caterpillar were a case in point. Yes, CES is still the world’s largest technology trade show, but what does it mean? It feels too broad to have a meaningful purpose. It feels to me like some dystopian digital skid stain across all aspects of modern life. This at odds with the excitement I felt over game changing technologies in previous years. Others like analyst and author Jonathan Goldberg noticed the lack of focus too.
Combine the lack of focus with the broken globalisation model due to the US – China war means that CES needs to move on from CES 2023, or it will go the way of similar trade shows like CeBIT – nothing but a memory full of old news releases on technology company websites.
