From ‘superman’ to ‘big tiger’, Li Ka shing loses favour with Beijing | South China Morning Post – interesting analysis of the changing sentiment of the Chinese government to Li Ka shing. Li Ka-shing has managed to walk his own path, even compared to other Hong Kong oligarchs. He was also able to play well with westerners. Li Ka shing was just just a man with a plastic flower factory and a headful of ambition until he persuaded HSBC to help him acquire property during the 1967 riots. HSBC bought into Hutchison Whampoa in 1979, got rid of the current taipan Douglas Clague. They then lent Li Ka shing the money to buy the business, including HSBC’s own 22% stake at a knockdown price of 639 million Hong Kong dollars. A large amount of money, but still less than the value of the assets being bought. Li has become even richer thanks to skilful use of the conglomerate discount phenomenon
Consumer behaviour
The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis: Drivers of Prediction Accuracy in World Politics – Journal of Experimental Psychology – interesting traits and teams rather than individuals tend to do better. It would be interesting to see how this affects the wisdom of crowds given they are a mass of individuals rather than a team per se (PDF)
FMCG
Most Energy Drink Companies Market to Minors, Report Finds | Time – this could be a ticking time bomb from a regulatory point of view
Media
Case Study: How Huawei turned its smartphone business around | Marketing Interactive – superlative headline but interesting overview of programmatic buying in China via iClick
Millward Brown Digital partners with Snapchat | Research Live – interesting they can tell an ad
Vinyl’s difficult comeback | The Guardian – interesting opportunity for manufacturing record press machines
Online
LIVEhouse.in – Online Broadcasting Service – really cool Asian content
Security
UK’s Cameron won’t “allow” strong encryption of communications — GigaOM – this is the most disturbing stuff I have seen and read in a long term, the Home Secretary is a political role by its very nature. It is not even an independent judiciary signing off. Secondly, given the poor understanding of technology by the body politic in the UK it doesn’t inspire confidence – if there is a back door for HMG, there is a back door for an abusive third party. Finally this is crush or encourage innovative start ups who focus on privacy to move offshore – Shoreditch to Berlin for instance. More related content here.
Wireless
BlackBerry Responds to Media Report – Press Releases – not talking to Samsung, it didn’t sound like it made sense to me
Smartphones At Tipping Point In China | Young’s China Business – domestic Chinese smartphone market likely to contract 10 per cent over the next year – shipments of all types of cellphones actually plummeted 22 percent in China last year to 452 million units, led by a 64 percent plunge in 2G models and 46 percent drop in 3G ones. (Chinese article) China’s mobile users now number 1.28 billion, giving the nation a penetration rate of 95 percent.
Smartphone shipments didn’t fare nearly as badly as the older 2G and 3G models, but were still down 8.2 percent last year to 389 million units. That means that a hefty 86 percent of all cellphones shipped in China last year were smartphones, which were rapidly flooding the market as new players jumped joined the space and older ones ramped up production.
It’s worth noting that the 389 million figure is unit shipments and not actual sales. I suspect a big portion of those smartphones — perhaps as much as 20-30 percent — are still sitting in distributor warehouses and on store shelves as unsold inventory due to the market saturation – expect channel clearing sales or developing market dumping