Ged Carroll

Category: business | 商業 | 상업 | ビジネス

My interest in business or commercial activity first started when a work friend of my Mum visited our family. She brought a book on commerce which is what business studies would have been called decades earlier. I read the book and that piqued my interest.

At the end of your third year in secondary school you are allowed to pick optional classes that you will take exams in. this is supposed to be something that you’re free to chose.

I was interested in business studies (partly because my friend Joe was doing it). But the school decided that they wanted me to do physics and chemistry instead and they did the same for my advanced level exams because I had done well in the normal level ones. School had a lot to answer for, but fortunately I managed to get back on track with college.

Eventually I finally managed to do pass a foundational course at night school whilst working in industry. I used that to then help me go and study for a degree in marketing.

I work in advertising now. And had previously worked in petrochemicals, plastics and optical fibre manfacture. All of which revolve around business. That’s why you find a business section here on my blog.

Business tends to cover a wide range of sectors that catch my eye over time. Business usually covers sectors that I don’t write about that much, but that have an outside impact on wider economics. So real estate would have been on my radar during the 2008 recession.

  • Yiminjian

    Yiminjian

    Canada

    One of the most popular articles on the South China Morning Post website this year was about the phenomenon of yiminjian or ‘immigration jail’. Canada has been a popular destination for wealthy Chinese to set up their homes. The scions of the Huawei business had a couple of mansions in Vancouver. They were following a well trod path. Li Ka-shing had his family living in Canada since the early 1970s and the South China Morning Post had a permanent Vancouver correspondent for 25 years.

    I guess mainland Chinese are less enamoured with Vancouver and other Canadian cities than their Hong Kong counterparts, hence the phrase yiminjian.

    That anyone should immigrate to Canada while regarding living there as a burdensome task to be endured or avoided might sound weird, but the concept is so common among some Chinese immigrant circles that there is a word for it: yiminjian, or “immigration jail”. The term refers to the period of compulsory Canadian residency (now, four years out of the previous six) which one must suffer before applying for citizenship. Think of a Canadian passport as the get-out-of-jail card.

    It needs to be emphasised that this mindset does not apply to all Chinese immigrants – only that subset for whom greater opportunities exist back in China (and only a subset of those).

    The problem that confronts these migrants is that Canada promises safety from the pace of change that has swept across China since the start of the cultural revolution to the rise of Mr Xi’s ‘tigers & flies’ programme. But China offers an opportunity to make out like a proverbial bandit and accumulate fantastic amounts of wealth.

    But creating that much wealth means ties of an often murky nature with authority figures. If you need land to build a factory, only the local government can sell you that land. If you need permits (which you will), or utility services such as power and water – you need government cooperation.

    Government cooperation comes at a cost and is facilitated through layers of bribery. The system of bribery even extends into business disputes as powerful government friends are called upon to smite the opponents business. All you need is a shift in power, like the one that happened under Xi Jinping and you could find yourself on the run. This kind of collaboration and corruption at the highest levels was outlined in Desmond Shum’s autobiographical account Red Roulette.

    More jargon explained here.

    More information
    Immigration mega-fraud: The rich Chinese immigrants to Canada who don’t really want to live there | South China Morning Post  – paywall

  • Kinect + more news

    Kinect

    Rare and the rise and fall of Kinect • Eurogamer.net – or how Microsoft fumbled the future with Kinect. Kinect is a motion-sensing piece of hardware, allowing users to interact with Xbox games. It is able to monitor the movements of up to four people at the same time.  More related technology stories here.

    Business

    What’s next for Apple? – CBS News – Charlie Rose so not exactly hard hitting

    Gadgets

    Don’t feel guilty about buying tech toys this holiday season – Slate – interesting riff on the angst that parents of gen-x kids had about television. I suspect it isn’t about the toy, but about time poverty of the parents

    Security

    Backdoor on Juniper firewalls – Schneier on Security – if it wasn’t the NSA who did this, we have a case where a US government backdoor effort (Dual-EC) laid the groundwork for someone else to attack US interests

    Technology

    China’s share of global LCD chip market to jump from zero to 12pc – SCMP – I expected it to be higher both in terms of volume and value. (paywall)

    Web of no web

    Baidu Joins Race to Build Autonomous Cars – WSJ – (paywall) – they could get a leap forward if it works in Beijing’s winter air…

    The Internet of Things – Supplied or Demanded? | naked capitalism – interesting analysis of the internet of things. As the environment becomes connected we enter an online world. To paraphrase Bruce Lee ‘the web of no web‘

    Wireless

    The Google Nexus 6P Review – Anandtech – expensive for what it is – interesting review, bear in mind that Google chose the spec for Huawei to implement. Price point considered expensive for the product in the review

  • 2016 just where is it all going?

    I started to think about 2016 just where is it all going?And Uber immediately sprang to mind. It is obvious that Uber’s CEO had never watched The Princess Bride, a cultural touch stone for both generation x and generation y, otherwise they would have known the maxim:

    Never get involved in a land war in Asia

    There is a lot of reason why this is true, the phrase captures the essence of a remark Douglas McArthur had said. If you play the board game Risk, Asia poses a problem due to the amount of territories involved.

    I expect Uber will continue to funnel money into China and still get sand in its face. Quite what this means for Lyft I am not so sure.

    Twitter gets a change of management, but that doesn’t do any good. The reasons for this are already apparent:

    Twitter has stopped growing at all in the US in 2015. This is a big deal because the US is the bellwether market for advertising innovation and advertisers like growing audience numbers.

    It has growing content volumes on broadly static growth, which has infrastructure costs. It also has costs from trying to innovate itself out of trouble with advertisers.

    Although there aren’t hard numbers to support it, there is a body of evidence to suggest that the number of times a day a consumer accesses the platform has declined and the number of impressions per post would flatten or decline.

    All of this would be bad news for potential advertisers and their intermediaries in the advertising and PR world.

    Fintech bubble that will take good ideas and bad ones down together. Banks are currently considered to be ripe for disruption. One of the key problems with this is that technologists think it will be easy to sweep aside regulations that banks operate under.

    The reality is rather different, these aren’t taxi services or hotels but people with real political and financial clout. These are the same organisations who managed to persuade governments to bankrupt themselves in order to bail them out in 2008.

    In the late 1990s and early 2000 there was a similar bubble around Linux and open source software. A number of companies at the front of it including VA Linux didn’t last the bubble, but the effect was to make Linux ubiquitous from consumer electronics to banking systems. I suspect a similar impact for technologies such as Blockchain. It may prove to be a handier way than historic transactional databases for say low transaction rate businesses; but that doesn’t mean that corporate enterprises will buy the technology or services from start-ups. Instead, the bits that prove themselves through the Linux Foundation are likely to be co-opted by the likes of HP, Oracle or Huawei in the future.

    Ultimately these providers aren’t selling a shiny technology but trust. Think of it in terms of two axis of risk:

    • CTOs will take a chance on a technology where a major vendor is involved if it makes sense (IBM and the internet for instance)
    • They will take a chance on a new vendor to do something that is well understood (think the Indian outsourcers like Infosys and Wipro)
    • But they would be hard pressed to take a risk on both vendor and technology at the same time, think systems integrator marchFIRST which championed then new web technologies to enterprises around about the time of the dot com bust

    We will have reached peak ad-blocking. Ad blocking still requires a modicum of savvy from a consumer audience, just as an in the same way encryption isn’t completely mainstream – the same will be true with ad-blocking. However there will be an increased interest in native advertising.  There won’t be the complete meltdown of retargeting or programmatic for instance that ad blocking would tend to imply.

    The internet in the EU will become increasingly regulated. At the moment the European Union is succumbing to The Fear. In the past, whether it was the Red Brigade, The Baader Meinhof gang or Northern Ireland there was a lot of emphasis put on keeping normality. The only real notable change in the UK was sealing up bins on the London Underground and other public transport services. Because there was a collective memory going back to the second world war, there was a recognition that keeping society normal was a key element in dealing with terrorism – whether the rise of the right or the left.

    After the cold war the parameters of risk versus impact on societies reaction acted to it changed. This was the coming of The Fear – the roots of it can be found in the US reaction to 9/11. America had not experienced terrorism or foreign attack on its soil since the war of Independence. The fear felt by Americans was palpable and infectious. Each risk faced by a society was coupled to an asymmetric response. This was something that terrorist theorists planned. The risks become more abstract including paedophiles or the catch-all of ‘organised crime’ to give governments greater insight into consumers lives. It has only taken 20 years for Germany to forget the lessons of life under the Stasi.

    This won’t change any time soon as governments have a lack of incentive to give up on powers they have already legislate for themselves. If one looks at the UK mainstream political spectrum, both Labour and Conservative regimes have been remarkably similar in terms of legislating consumer privacy out of existence.

    We will have reached peak smartphone and tablet. China has now reached replacement rate for devices, there is a corresponding lack of paradigm shifts in the pipelines for smartphone design and software. Tablets have shown themselves to be nice devices for data consumption but not requiring regular upgrades like the smartphone or replacement for the PC.

    VR in 2016 will be all about finding the right content. VR won’t work in gaming unless it provides e-gaming athletes with some sort of competitive advantage, if it does then gaming will blow things up massively. Gaming will not be the only content vehicle for VR, it needs an Avatar-like moment to drive adoption into the early mainstream. From a technology point-of-view the smartphone drive towards OLED displays should benefit virtual reality goggles.

    GoPro is going to get eaten alive. Manufacturers like drone-maker DJI have been integrating GoPro-esque cameras into their products and UPQ (think a cross between gadget company and a fast fashion outfit like Forever 21) are providing much cheaper (but not cheap and nasty) alternatives.

    More information
    What stands between Uber and success in China? | CNBC
    Uber CEO accuses Chinese messaging app WeChat of censorship | The Telegraph
    Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) – Umair Haque
    MarchFirst enters the terrible twos | CNet
    Why ISIS has the potential to be a world-altering revolution — Aeon
    LG Secures Super Bowl Slot And Ridley Scott For OLED TV ad | Forbes

    Older predictions
    2015: just where is it all going? | renaissance chambara
    2014: crystal ball gazing, how did I do?
    2014: just where is it all going? | renaissance chambara 
    Crystal ball-gazing: 2013 how did I do?
    2013: just where is it all going?
    Crystal ball-gazing: 2012 how did I do?
    2012: just where is digital going?
    Crystal ball-gazing: 2011 how did I do?
    2010: How did I do?
    2010: just where is digital going?

  • Cullinan SUV + more things

    Sneak Peek at Rolls-Royce Project Cullinan “SUV” – Luxury Insider – the approach to teasing the Cullinan is more like the way (Android) smartphones are marketed. It is interesting that car makers now leak this photography. As a teenager I remember that there was quite an industry in photographers taking pictures of engineering mules and models being tested in disguise. Hans G. Lehmann’s photography in Car magazine of the late 1980s were legendary. More on luxury here.

    Discogs Relaunch Record Store Database ‘VinylHub’ – hyponik – good to see that Discogs is not sitting on their laurels. Independent record stores are using Discogs to reach customers around the world. It makes sense for Discogs to build a database about real world record stores that make up its seller backbone.

    New proposal for Yahoo’s turnaround: get rid of Marissa Mayer, 75% of staff, and lavish perks – Quartz – they would struggle to keep the other 25% of the staff left. It is the antithesis of the Silicon Valley culture. You couldn’t run a business like Yahoo! in the same way as you can run tired enterprise technology companies using the private equity or Computer Associates formula. Despite what you might think Yahoo! relies on innovation. PHP and Hadoop are just two of the technologies that have come out of Yahoo!. If you don’t have talent, you go from having a profitable business with an older client base; to a loss making business with even less of a client base. Websites go downhill a lot faster than milking enterprise software users for maintenance contracts.

    Michael Tsai – Blog – Apple Pushes iPhone 6s Pop-up Ads to App Store – which indicates that Apple’s customer upgrade cycle might be too long for Apple’s finance department. It also suggests that Apple might be moving away from the pre-owned market being an on-ramp to iPhone usage.

  • 2015 crystal ball gazing, how did I do?

    I did some predictions in January this year, how did I do in my 2015 crystal ball gazing?

    Sony Corp. cleans house with the management teams of its US businesses. One of Sony’s start-up bets (the e-ink watch, smart locks etc) comes good. Sony will still be supported by its Japanese financial services business.

    Not quite sure how Sony’s management team survived but they did, only Amy Pascal got canned rather than a wholesale purge. Sony still seems to have its start-ups percolating, instead Sony has blown up in DSLR cameras and selling sensor components to rivals. Sony’s financial services business still seems to be contributing to the bottom line. Sony decided to spin out its audio and video business, just as it had spun out its TV and PC business already.

    I could see the student becoming the master as Huawei sells into IBM enterprise markets in the developing world and possibly Europe.

    Huawei is making big gains in enterprise storage, with a shot of getting a worldwide top three vendor in the immediate future.

    Shareholder activists don’t take a run at Google. Google is moving from a growth stock to value as search advertising revenue growth is declining.

    But that didn’t stop them rolling out Alphabet to make the big bet efforts more transparent for investors. It was also an admission that Google is becoming a value stock more like GE as top line revenue growth declines. Its two tier share structure still prevents shareholder activism, but that doesn’t mean Google has a cloth ear.

    Google’s privacy and antitrust regulatory woes will continue to fester outside the U.S.

    The European Union, Russia, Korea and possibly the U.S. I reckon I have this one.

    Expect more societal push-back as geeks become the new investment bankers in terms of being societal punch bags.

    The localised protests in Silicon Valley against the ‘Google Bus’ expanded. What drove protests transnational was the rise of the sharing economy alongside the labour market and economic distortions that it drives; just Google Uber or AirBnB.

    There won’t be an over-arching XML type bridge for the IoT. Battery life will limit the fantastic visions that pundit have for wearables and the internet of things.

    The market is fragmented for the cloud infrastructure on IoT. We still have Apple Watches that struggle to get a days use out of a battery charge.

    We are going to continue to see baby steps towards more immersive experiences, as VR glasses slowly make progress in the marketplace. OLEDs would be an ideal application for VR glasses, particularly if they want to hold off smartphones in a frame.

    So far, we haven’t seen OLEDs being used and the Oculus Rift still isn’t an expensive consumer product yet.

    Content is likely to role out in a similar way to IMAX – visually stunning documentaries about space and nature alongside computer games.

    Content has been slow in coming to the fore, the stuff that I have seen is marketing content (I was involved in making films for New Balance to market their football range of products). I am still waiting for content to come through, it will take time, possibly longer than 12 months.

    Despite The Interview, Hollywood still won’t do cinema / digital simultaneous releases, or global simultaneous releases for any content that wouldn’t have been direct to TV/video in an earlier age.

    Looking back, I feel guilty putting this one in, there is nothing more predictable than the intransigence of the media industry.

    The YotaPhone2 won’t get the customer base it deserves as it struggles against the superior marketing muscle of Samsung in the premium Android segment of the market.

    I was right on this, but not for all the right reasons. Samsung had a hell of a time this year as cheaper Chinese players further commoditised the Android marketplace at such a pace it even started to hurt their supply chain. Yota did make an impact however in a different way; Huawei’s P8 launched with an option e-ink back to the phone.

    Late on in the year, Yota Device sold a substantial share to REX Global Entertainment Holdings Limited, a Hong Kong listed company that is better known for its leisure, tourism and gaming holdings than its expertise in technology. In essence this looks like some sort of shadow purchase. Having the backing of a Chinese company could speed the entry of the Yotaphone 3 to market – the previous models were dogged with slow access to market (presumably getting through the Shenzhen eco-system).

    The Cyanogen distribution of Android won’t go anywhere fast due to its geographic exclusivity agreements with the likes of OnePlus and MicroMax cramping the style of handset manufacturers with global ambitions.

    Cyanogen isn’t going anywhere fast, OnePlus went their own way with an Android distribution.

    This offers an opportunity for Jolla’s SailfishOS.

    But not of enough opportunity apparently, the company has had to restructure and can’t get the kind of funding it needs.

    Google revamps the resources and process to get more Chinese smartphone manufacturers going through its official channels for compatibility (CTS) and have a Google Mobile Services (GMS) license.

    No Google still didn’t get its act together.

    An increased emphasis on paid media over earned engagement / community management and marketing automation makes social look more like electronic direct marketing.

    I am taking this, in the words of a media agency strategy director I was speaking with ‘Facebook offers a combination of the reach of television (advertising) with the precision of direct marketing.’

    Asian platforms WeChat, LINE and KakaoTalk have led the way in both consumer and brand adoption. They will continue with a relatively slow international rollout.

    Their rollout has certainly been slow with adoption picking up slowly in East and Southeast Asian markets. Facebook Messenger is apparently experimenting with e-commerce, but its early days.

    I suspect that international e-commerce will have breakout years.

    What I didn’t expect was that the demand would come from Chinese consumers

    We’re likely to see European states take a similar stance to India and China and more widely blocking sites for security considerations and media IP enforcement. Expect the UK and Australia to lead the way in terms of site censorship.

    Between anti-terrorist legislation and the right to be forgotten, I have this.What I didn’t suspect was the sustained war on cryptography.

    More information
    2015: just where is it all going? | renaissancechambara
    Sony will spin off its audio and video business as it searches for profitability | The Verge
    Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal stepping down in wake of hacking scandal | The Verge
    Why Huawei Thinks It Can Enter Storage Market Top 3 by 2018 | eWeek
    Google Owner Accuses EU of Antitrust About-Face | WSJ
    Google Said to Be Under U.S. Antitrust Scrutiny Over Android | Bloomberg
    Korea Government to Investigate Google’s Android OS for Anti-trust Violation | Android Headlines
    San Francisco’s guerrilla protest at Google buses swells into revolt | The Guardian
    Don’t buy the ‘sharing economy’ hype: Airbnb and Uber are facilitating rip-offs | The Guardian
    Huawei P8 E-ink Smartphone Case Sports a 4.3″ Screen | The Digital Reader
    Yota Devices aims high after buyout, with $50 million promised for product development | Android Authority
    Oxygen OS 2.1.3 Update OTA available now for OnePlus X; Android 6.0 Marshmallow next | Venture Capital Post
    Mobile OS Maker Jolla To Cut Half Its Staff, Restructure Its Debt After Funding Stalls | TechCrunch
    Amazon.com is seeing a surge in buyers from China – Quartz
    Net-a-Porter’s China General Manager Claire Chung Talks Mobile Sales and Yoox Merger | Jing Daily
    Europe’s Latest Export: Internet Censorship | WSJ
    Porn filters: Cameron vows to protect internet censorship from EU law | Russia Today