Ged Carroll

Category: china | 中國 | 중국 | 中華

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.

  • Ten most popular posts of H1 2016

    In order of traffic volume, the ten most popular posts of H1 2016  on my blog (up to the beginning of June):

    1. What are the major reasons behind Yahoo!’s drastic decline – a Quora question inspired post. The reasons I highlight are a bit different to the popular media narrative around the Yahoo! business
    2. How the Panama Papers story broke online – a look at how the story broke across social media and traditional news with data
    3. What the IFTTT is going on? – IFTTT changed the way it approached development which left many service users such as me in the lurch. The key outtake is don’t trust services that you don’t pay for.
    4. Inside Virgin Atlantic’s online racism crisis – how the Chinese diaspora teamed up to highlight a racially motivated incident on a Virgin flight.
    5. On Writing – inspired by a similar post that Stephen Waddington did. We had a contrast of approaches and motivations
    6. The Trouble with Twitter – with growth stalled what does it mean for the social media platform?
    7. Yahoo! how did we get here? – similar post in many respects to to the top-ranking post that highlights missed opportunities
    8. Online advertising and technology data points – this is the April edition of a monthly (or as near monthly updates on statistics that I can do)
    9. The Smartphone Market and Huawei – analysis of Huawei’s consumer business. One can see the impact of smartphones on Huawei’s business. Huawei’s feature phone business was more successful than their smartphone business in terms of profit margin for a good while. Whilst Huawei has aspired to become progressively more  I updated it in a separate post when Huawei published its annual results at the beginning of April
    10. Everyday tools that are a part of my process part one – items that I use in my everyday workflow to create, curate content and brand strategy.

  • Jeremy Corbyn + more things

    Jeremy Corbyn Facebook strategy is so much more sophisticated than you think | Business Insider – I am not convinced that this is going to move the needle for him, it won’t reach beyond his core followers. It doesn’t match marketing best practice which makes me believe Jeremy Corbyn will be very disappointed come election time.

    How e-commerce changes lives in rural China | South China Morning Post – interesting article the key thing to remember is that the South China Morning Post is owned by Jack Ma of Alibaba. More on China here.

    Deodorant Changes Attractiveness Of Men And Women In Different Ways – PsyBlog – How men who appear low in masculinity can be more attractive to women.Wearing deodorant makes men who are seen as low in masculinity more attractive to women, new research finds. – the original Lynx / Axe brand positioning was closer to the mark than we thought

    Can a Neuroscientist Understand Donkey Kong, Let Alone a Brain? – The Atlantic – Two researchers applied common neuroscience techniques to a classic computer chip. Their results are a wake-up call for the whole field.

    This ‘Demonically Clever’ Backdoor Hides In a Tiny Slice of a Computer Chip | WIRED

    The Chinese Government is Setting Up Its Own Major Science Fiction Award | io9 – this is really interesting, think about how Star Trek inspired the cellphone or Neuromancer and Star Wars inspired augmented reality. I wonder what way the government will be directing the content towards. Now do you see what China is doing here? A second thing is the that science fiction writer Cixin Liu is the one bright spot in Chinese (government-approved) soft power at the moment

    The Perks Are Great. Just Don’t Ask Us What We Do. — Backchannel – life inside a malvertising company. Interesting expose

    Berlin clubbers are now snorting chocolate to get high | Dazed – WTF. I’d imagine that just because chocolate sounds innocuous doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be painful to snort

  • 2016 Mary Meeker presentation

    2016 Mary Meeker’s annual presentation on internet trends is a tradition within the technology sector that goes back more than two decades. Meeker used to be a sell side analyst during the dot com boom and was known as a cheerleader for the sector. Unlike Harry Blodget she didn’t come unstuck with the subsequent bust.

    More recently Meeker moved to Silicon Valley and took a job with a VC firm. Hence the reason why the 2016 Mary Meeker presentation is done in conjunction with KPCB (Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers).

    The key themes explored in the presentation this year include:

    • Mobile – a favourite for a number of years, but with over half of all internet sessions being done on a smartphone or similar it was inevitable that it would take up a substantial amount of the presentation. Mobile is maturing which is shown in the decline in growth rate of the sector this year. Android is picking up market share due to its cheaper handsets but still lagging behind in share of profit
    • Declining global economic growth. Global debt has risen higher and faster than global GDP. Population growth is also slowing and ageing. Meeker thought that India may be the bright spot due to its demographics, but this assumes that it can get over its structural issues and take advantage of its young population. That is probably overly-optimistic because of rising hindu nationalism
    • Online advertising – efficacy still a serious issue to be dealt with. Consumers hate it hence ad blocking.
    • Social: Meeker saw the big factors being video, images and messaging
    • Voice: the rise of voice driven assistants in the home and on mobile devices. The decoupling of China versus the rest of the world is apparent in this new category.

    Here is the latest iteration for 2016

    More on Mary Meeker here.

  • Weiying + more news

    China’s Tencent and Weiying Take $85 Million Stake in Korea’s YG Entertainment | Variety – China is the market for a lot of Korean TV. Gaining soft power through culture is part of the government’s aspirations – this deal makes both political and business sense. Korean production companies have found that their shows are often blocked by Chinese regulators. Instead the best way around this has been licensing the formats for a remake locally, which offers modest payments. Whether it is good for Korea in the longer term is another matter.

    China has a number of problems on its hands before it can replicate Korea’s success. China has a warped production model that works on patronage and ever bigger budgets and returns. Great for doing a large scale fight scene, not so good for romantic dramas. China hasn’t managed to build up a bench of likeable stars with international appeal in the same way that Korean has managed in a consistent manner. The desire of the government propaganda department blunts the appeal of dramas. Weiying will struggle to give China the kind of soft power that Korea and Japan enjoy respectively abroad. More on Korea related topics here.

    Discover Vietnam’s most chosen brands | Kantar Worldwide – well done Unilever. Unilever is especially interesting because of its success with both Vietnamese urban and rural consumers. However Nestle is a high-performing number 4. Unilever’s competition isn’t P&G, but local brands Musan and Vinamilk.

    How Akira sent shockwaves through pop culture and changed it | Dazed Digital – still an amazing film. I remember seeing it at the 051 cinema in Liverpool, some time before 1994 and it blew me away. It wasn’t just an engaging story but a well thought out future. Architecture wasn’t just new and shiny like Star Trek, but there were new and old side-by-side like London or Hong Kong. It was the future cyberpunk Japan that author William Gibson mirrored in his own early books. The impact of Akira encouraged me to watch more anime, when then led to my love of Ghost In The Shell.

    Tumblr is now blocked in China | Techinasia – surprised it hadn’t happened already given its meme and porn driven nature

  • June 2016 research slides

    Here is a copy of the slides that I pull together (when I have the time) of publicly available data that would be of use. This is the June 2016 research slides.

    Google search volumes

    This month I have some new data around search which came from disclosures at Google I/O in terms of search volumes. We talk about social as if search has gone out of style but its growth is still staggering. This is now driven by mobile device penetration and adoption as computing devices on the go. It also speaks to the wider number of questions that search now answers. It used to be that search answered with ‘facts’ found online. It then became more contextual with shortcuts that gave you the weather forecast or a foreign exchange rate. Mobile moved this on further to items like local recommendations.

    Partly through the search box, but also by more meta detail about the device doing the searching and its location to within a few metres due to GPS and cell tower triangulation. Voice interaction has also started to impact search volume. Image driven search still seems to be an area that could drive much more potential search volume, that would be valuable for commerce.
    Google global search volume
    Looking at global search revenue over time, Google’s monopoly position becomes immediately apparent. It is amazing how Bing and Yahoo! haven’t managed to grow market share but just transfer value from one to the other. In the Chinese market, Sohu has been obliterated with Baidu search. But one does have to wonder about the value of web search, when so much internet usage now happens in the WeChat eco-system.
    Global Search Revenues
    More details about me here.
    Slide20

    Full presentation

    Full presentation available for download as a PDF on Slideshare and you can find more research related posts here.