Kamusta – welcome to the Philippines category of this blog. This is where I share anything that relates to the Republic of the Philippines, business issues relating to the Philippines, the Filipino people or culture. Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if fast food business Jollibee launched a new advertising campaign. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as Philippines.
So far, I haven’t had too much Filipino related content here, though I recognise that it is a fast growing and important market in Asia. The Philippines has been somewhat of a sleeping economic giant. While Japanese manufacturers like Canon have long used the country for manufacture, it had a large talented and educated workforce. Prior to the late 1960s, the Philippines enjoyed one of the highest economic growth rates in Asia.
The Philippines has the best deep water port in the Pacific and is a landing point for many trans-Pacific optical fibre cables.
I am also aware of the positive impact that Filipinos have had around the world from the worlds of healthcare to media and entertainment.
I don’t tend to comment on local politics because I don’t understand it that well, but I am interested when it intersects with business. An example of this would be legal issues affecting the media sector for instance.
If there are Filipino subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.
Very Ralph is a documentary that celebrates the career of Ralph Lauren. What’s interesting is Lauren’s lack of expertise in fashion and design. Instead Very Ralph captures Lauren’s childhood ability as a stylist and art director to eventually create a Ralph Lauren world. Very Ralph became a descriptor of a style and a lifestyle. It’s a very unique way of brand building that you usually see from the likes of Muji rather than many luxury brands.
If Apple could have a ‘Very Ralph‘ moment their role in luxury tech would be cemented beyond the Mac and the iPhone. Charlie Rose’s seminal interview with Ralph Lauren is also worth watching.
Living wake
A generation before me in Ireland, living wakes were a thing. Usually it was when a member of the family was migrating to the United States, Canada or Australia. Michelle ‘Mike’ Ng’s living wake was because she had state four cancer. The film is an emotional rollercoaster.
Miss Goddess of Beauty
A lot of what keeps Hong Kong (and Singapore for that matter), is the hundreds of thousands of domestic helpers who run middle class households. They cook, care for the elderly, clean the homes, do the shopping and bring up the children. While being cheery and sociable people they largely remain unseen and unheard; except for Sundays when they congregate in public spaces.
Despite the western view of beauty pageants as objectifying women by MEN, Miss Goddess of Beauty is different. It allows these women to to be seen and creatively express themselves. The entire event is organised by the community of domestic helpers. Although the ladies are predominantly Filipinas, there is at least one Indonesian participant in the pageant – a solidarity built on a shared experience in Hong Kong.
Quentin Tarantino on going to see The Matrix
Tarantino recalls how the TV spots, rather than reviews or word-of-mouth drove the viewership of The Matrix. The power of advertising to build a world that excited the heck out of the audience before they saw the movie.
I was sparked to lead this post based on footage that I watched about a priest in South India with regards a robotic elephant. Robots in religion have taken off in both Shinto and Hindu ceremonies.
Japan
Academics have widely talked about how the Shinto-based belief system have aided Japanese societal acceptance of robots, in comparison to western society. Secondly, Japanese authors have been exploring what it means to be human and what kind of dilemmas and opportunities do robots and AI bring in a future society. Robots in religion are a natural extension of robots in society.
Buddhism leads the way
What’s less commented on is that Japan’s buddhist temples have been leading robots in religion. The reality is that many Japanese see Shinto and Buddhism as complementary in nature and get involved in both beliefs.
Japan has some unique religious challenges that are interlinked. Temples are struggling as less people are active in their religious practice, the factors for this decline is multi-factorial in nature.
A second challenge that as the population shrinks roles need to be automated. What started in factories is now impacting the food and beverage sector (vending machines and restaurant robo-serving staff), so it was only a matter of time that robots in religion would supplement the clergy.
India
In India robots in religion is about kindness and de-risking religious ceremonies. In South India elephants take part in religious ceremonies. However the conditions that elephants are kept in can be cruel in nature and even result in death. Secondly, elephants can unintentionally kill or injure people involved in a religious celebration. This report on NHK World shows how robots in religion have been adapted to Hindu needs.
Finally, the elephant robot is used in celebrations over a large geographic area and is easily transported around. Robots in religion are likely to make even more sense as India urbanises even further, as the benefits are amplified in the denser environment.
How confucianism, communism (in particular Stalin’s take on Leninism) and an accident of history has led to the nationalistic, fragile, insecure Chinese state with imperial ambitions we know today.
China’s ‘trinket town’ at heart of push for renminbi trade | Financial Times – Yiwu was one of the first cities in China to allow individual merchants to settle larger cross-border deals in renminbi. Most cities have an annual cap of $50,000. Given Yiwu’s reputation for cheap goods and flexible terms, helped by the fact that wholesalers do not pay either corporate tax or market rent, exporters have sufficient bargaining power to request settlement in renminbi. “When you have only one place to go to purchase something, the seller sets the terms on how transactions are settled,” said James Wu, a Yiwu-based furniture exporter who began demanding renminbi payments from Middle Eastern clients last year – the last quote is a great example of
Interesting video from NHK World on how temples are adapting to a lack of new attendees and priests. I am not sure whether this is down to demographic change or the secularisation of society
A Pokémon-Card Crime Spree Jolts Japan – WSJ – Japan has been staggered by a Pokémon crime spree. Stores are now paying for banklike security to ward off villains who go to extraordinary lengths, even rappelling down the side of buildings, to plunder Pokémon. Hosaka was working in senior care when he had the idea of opening a cozy card shop in the suburb of Machida where customers could mingle at tables. Instead, he says, the little cards, “have become like Rolex watches, gold, silver, platinum or used cars.” – It makes sense when you think of the cards being ‘real life NFTs’
Criminal Rolex Gangs and Traveling with Watches, Part I – WOE – crime affecting luxury consumption. Interesting that London is a crime centre is prominently name checked alongside Johannesburg, South Africa. This will impact luxury retailers, luxury travel and hospitality and auction houses
Luxury
Bay Area Lawsuit Alleges Man Spent $220,000 To Get A Watch He Never Got – there’s also the added complexity of Shreve recently losing its status as a Patek AD. The lawsuit brings some ten causes of action against Shreve, including breach of contract, intentional and negligent misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, false promise, and unfair business practices, pursuant to California’s Unfair Competition Law – this was only a matter of time. Its the same in the UK
Ad agencies and clients clash: tension over transparency in fees, services | Ad Age – a talent shortage has left agencies without enough senior executives to service accounts. Combined, such factors contribute to what marketers see as an increasing lack of transparency. One executive who leads procurement across marketing and content for a major consumer goods company said the discounts and rebates that media agencies, in particular, get from a media buy have always been “murky,” but one area agencies have always been transparent in is breaking down their fees. The brand executive said auditors, working on behalf of the marketers, have previously been able to get agencies to disclose their margins, overheads and salaries without protest—it’s standard practice and allows clients to know they are being charged a fair price. But that’s starting to change, they said, having run into issues with getting shops to break down their fees in the recent agency review their company underwent
Media
This Year Next Year: 2023 Global Mid-Year Forecast – GroupM – calls the end of radio’s global growth story. Even taking into account streaming, WPP says that, globally, ad-supported audio has peaked. It will grow just 0.3% this year, says GroupM then “remain roughly flat over the next five years”. It’s about to join newspapers, magazines and broadcast television in a downward trajectory. GroupM also tackles the impact of AI on the industry. It reckons that within five years, the portion of “AI-enabled” advertising revenue globally will be worth $800bn. What is impossible to quantify is whether any of that is new money. Most likely, none of it. What is also impossible to quantify is just how dramatic the AI-driven reductions in cost of production will be. That sounds a relatively benign question until one realises that all those reduced costs are human jobs. GroupM identifies five key themes: Regulation (particularly around data privacy); connected TV (and an annualised 10%+ growth in the segment)’; AI “is likely to inform, or touch in some way, at least half of all advertising revenue by the end of 2023”; retail media to overtake TV by 2028; and “new business growth” (which sounds like the sort of thing an agency person would put in their predictions). Most importantly though, the GroupM outlook points to a more more significant factor. We’re at the end of a cycle that was defined by shifts between advertising channels, and then the disruption of Covid. “We are at an inflection point where the secular drivers of advertising growth above and beyond GDP growth are maturing, the pandemic upheaval is receding and the dynamic rise of digital advertising has slowed. This is the basis of our underlying forecast of mid-single-digit advertising growth over the next five years. However, the pervasive impact of AI on the world of advertising could change that.”
AI at Work: What People Are Saying | BCG – leaders love it, workers don’t. Businesses have only addressed the needs of leaders, which probably dialled up the anxiety with a sense that AI is something that happens to you and your career rather like a bad car accident
Beeper — All your chats in one app. Yes, really. – clients like Adium became less useful as Google and other services went away from common protocols and the IM giants AOL, MSN and Yahoo! disappeared. Beeper are trying to address this
If we go back to 1949 Dutch economics Petrus Johannes Verdoorn came up with a law – the long run productivity generally grows proportionally to the square root of output. This law addresses the relationship between the growth of output and the growth of productivity. Faster growth in output increases productivity due to increased returns.
“in the long run a change in the volume of production, say about 10 per cent, tends to be associated with an average increase in labor productivity of 4.5 per cent.”
Causes of the Slow Growth in the United Kingdom Nicholas Kaldor (1966) Cambridge University Press
A heuristic called Vandoorn’s coefficient of 0.484 was found in estimates of the law following Vandoorn’s original publication. Nicholas Kaldor who made similar points as far back as 1960 in his work Essays on Value and Distribution. Kaldor built on Verdoorn’s Law observing that manufacturing was the best way of increasing output.
Slater, Walker Securities
The UK economic hole isn’t anything new. Back when I was a child we saw UK industry disappearing at about 1.5% of industrial capacity a month. The source of the destruction was apparent in the post war period, although manufacturing innovation had been underbanked and under invested for decades. Jim Slater and his financial vehicle Slater, Walker Securities was the harbinger of forces that unleashed the UK economic hole.
The State We’re In
Economics editor Will Hutton wrote the The State We’re In and I got to read it while I was in college. It caught the policy wonk zeitgeist of the future Blair administration – making the argument for long termism and manufacturing as a creator of wealth together with Keynesian economics.
Slow Growth Britain to Cool Britannia
Hutton wasn’t alone in his viewpoint but building on the expertise and experience. Wilfred Beckerman in his book Slow Growth in Britain: Causes & Consequences published in 1979 is a case in point. As you read these books the same points are made over and over again about what has become the UK economic hole. The discovery and exploitation of North Sea oil provided a sticking plaster from 1982 through to 1999. But production in UK oil and gas fields have been in decline since. Any economic productivity benefit provided to British industry through a massive shake out was transferred to unemployment relief. Secondly industrial eco-systems or ‘clusters’ as Richard Florida would term them in his work Who’s Your City? disappeared, causing the manufacturing base to lose critical mass. Any gains were largely spent by 1990. Manufacturing was a driver and a shock absorber for productivity related issues – this is important for the subsequent UK economic hole.
While Hutton was read by the future Blair administration they did little about it, due to the Augean task that confronted them.
Following the decline of manufacturing the UK, focused on financial services which turned toxic in 2006. There were additional smaller bets on professional services and the creative industry (remember pre-millennium awkwardness of Cool Britannia)? As an economic rational decision maker, I pivoted my career out of industry and into the creative sector – thankfully I was young enough to be able to do it. Many couldn’t and were trapped in low value services jobs or living on long term sickness benefits to massage unemployment figures.
Young tax-paying workers
The collapse of financial services saw the current productivity collapse and stagnation amplifying the long standing UK economic hole. Brexit could be seen as a wail of pain and anger. The reality was that being in the EU allowed cheaper skilled workers to move to the UK and use existing manufacturing plants for the likes of Cadbury’s and Unilever. So the UK benefited from young tax-paying Europeans, but lost out in terms of wage depression. Brexit severed that last gasp of productivity increases.
What is really driving ExxonMobil’s clean energy commitments? | Financial Times – the decades long algae biofuels programme failed. Back when I worked in the oil industry at the start of my work life, ExxonMobil had the best research and development / innovation team in the oil industry. They were way ahead of the likes of Shell or BP. The heuristic within the industry went something along the lines of: BP could find oil anywhere, Occidental could get a contract to drill anywhere, Shell could market any product successfully and ExxonMobil could out-innovate the rest of them.
Mobil 1 oil on the shelf at a motor factors courtesy of Mike Mozart
For instance Mobil were decades ahead of everyone else with their Mobil 1 synthetic lubricating oil back in 1974. Castrol was processing petroleum oil and calling it synthetic, they were eventually caught out in 1998 – with Mobil winning a moral victory if not a court case. The point is that if ExxonMobil can’t get algae to work, I doubt any company can – energy desperately needs its semiconductor moment.
Talking about a semiconductor moment, one of the places where this would be really welcome would be green hydrogen. I had hoped that Ireland would be able to convert its wind power bounty into generating hydrogen by electrolysis as a way of moving and storing energy in a way that electrical batteries can’t match.
Only the Global-Health Emergency Has Ended – The Atlantic – “This virus is here to stay. It is still killing, and it’s still changing,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO – the cadence of an emergency might be finished but there is still subtantial health risk. It has declined to ‘only’ the fourth most common cause of death…
Genesis G80 Electrified vs. BMW i4 M50 | MACAU DAILY TIMES 澳門每日時報 – the G80 is closer to a 7 series than the i4 which is somewhere between the 3 and the 5 series. Overall I would prefer to go with a Genesis given the reliability issues that BMWs have had for the past two decades.
The Disconnect on Undersea Cable Security – Lawfare – The fibre-optic submarine cable sector is a vital, but ignored, part of the world’s critical infrastructure. Many members of Congress and the U.S. government, see the risks to subsea cables quite differently than cable owners and manufacturers. Brookings Institute’s Joseph Keller examines this disconnect, suggesting ways that the policy community can protect and advance this critical industry.
Thailand
Thailand legalised cannabis and an industry boom occurred. A key part is trying to integrate and provide value to the country’s hospitality, tourism and travel sectors.
Æon Flux’s surprisingly modern take on privacy and surveillance. | Slate – Æon Flux was a name that I hadn’t heard in at least a decade. I remember when it came out as I enjoyed cable TV in our student house. It fitted in with the wider cyber culture. The big beats and brash gravity defying visuals were everywhere from WipeOut to anime. The media was tech artefacts from a future counter-culture.
Macromedia Director and Flash produced animated video hardwired straight into our cortex. It was psychedelia but not as it had been experienced before. Asian animated and real world films weren’t mainstream but serious culture.
Æon Flux & The Matrix
The series came out in the early 1990s as part of a series of experimental animation on MTV called Liquid Television. It came out before The Matrix, yet drew from many similar influences:
Cyberpunk
Biopunk
Anime
Asian ‘gun fu’ action films
European comics in particular the space opera works of Möbius, Mézières & Christin. You can also see the influence that Chung had working with Ralph Bakshi on his fantasy animation
Gnostic beliefs
In another Matrix link; Æon Flux creator Peter Chung (피터 정) went on to create a segment for the Wachowskis’ The Animatrix which told part of the back story of The Matrix quadrology.
Privacy and the surveillance state
Each episode saw a conflict play out between an anarchic city and its authoritarian rival. Flux was an assassin from the anarchic city on undercover missions.
The animated series had been released on VHS, DVD and UMD – the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) disk media that was the ultimate manifestation of cyberpunk storage. For some reason, it hasn’t been released on Blu-Ray yet.
It was truly transmedia with computer games and graphic novels to complement the animated series. Eventually Hollywood did a live action version that was vaguely related to the original Æon Flux. The original was too difficult and avant garde to be a Hollywood franchise, which is probably why the animated version has slipped back out of view.
Given that Æon Flux was influenced by cyberpunk was inevitably seen as a prescient take on privacy and the surveillance state.
Consumer behaviour
Taking Affection Back | No Mercy / No Malice – some interesting and intractable problems in society revolving around how men are set up for failure. Contrast the diagnosis with this article: The Great Feminization of the American University | City Journal – Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma. For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus. Female students disproportionately patronize the burgeoning university wellness centers, massage therapies, relaxation oases, calming corners, and healing circles. Another newly installed female college president, Dartmouth’s Sian Leah Beilock, claims that the two “most pressing challenges of our time” are the “mental crisis among young people” and climate change. College institutions “really have a part to play in how we support students” suffering from that mental health crisis – correlation and causality aren’t the same thing
Why social class is advertising’s biggest diversity blind spot | Advertising | Campaign Asia – Social class might bring up antiquated ideas of British snobbery, but it exists everywhere. In Asia, social class is very pronounced. From obscenely wealthy ‘Crazy Rich Asian’ types, to a much reported on ‘rising middle class’, and a majority who are working class or live in poverty. The pandemic certainly brought class differences in Asia into sharp focus. Yet, despite making up the majority in society, advertising often fails to represent working class people. And when adverts do feature working class people, they usually perpetuate class-based stereotypes. Instead, the advertising industry is obsessed with targeting middle-class 18 to 34-year-olds, resulting in advertisements that seem to overlook the genuine diversity of society and instead mirror adland’s own demographic.
話題のChatGPTをLINEで使える「AIチャットくん」リリースから3日で20万登録突破 | みんなの便利な使用例を紹介 #AIチャットくん｜株式会社piconのプレスリリース – LINE adds ChatGPT gains 200,000 users in 3 days. ChatGPT speaks and understands Japanese, but uptake in Japan has been hampered, apparently, because you need to speak English to sign up. Line is the dominant messaging platform in Japan, and last week they added ChatGPT. You just add “AI Chat-kun” as a friend and start chatting. Up to five messages per day are free, and you can upgrade to unlimited messages for ¥680/month (about $5).
The Daring Ruse That Exposed China’s Campaign to Steal American Secrets – The New York Times – China publicly denies engaging in economic espionage, Chinese officials will indirectly acknowledge behind closed doors that the theft of intellectual property from overseas is state policy. James Lewis, a former diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recalls participating in a meeting in 2014 or so at which Chinese and American government representatives, including an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, discussed the subject. “An assistant secretary from the U.S. Department of Defense was explaining: Look, spying is OK — we spy, you spy, everybody spies, but it’s for political and military purposes,” Lewis recounted for me. “It’s for national security. What we object to is your economic espionage. And a senior P.L.A. colonel said: Well, wait. We don’t draw the line between national security and economic espionage the way you do. Anything that builds our economy is good for our national security.” The U.S. government’s response increasingly appears to be a mirror image of the Chinese perspective: In the view of U.S. officials, the threat posed to America’s economic interests by Chinese espionage is a threat to American national security.
Patriotic Alternative wasn’t a name familiar to me when I first heard about them instigating a riot in Liverpool on Saturday night. It doesn’t take that much to create a ruckus in some of the poorer areas of Liverpool.
I wasn’t particularly surprised by the burnt out police van; it sounds like a Merseyside Saturday night that went a bit out of control. That’s as Liverpudlian as a fried breakfast served in a ‘bin lid’ – a large white bun or bap large enough to contain bacon, sausage, a fried egg or two and brown sauce.
But there were aspects that did surprise me and all signs point to Patriotic Alternative. It’s a multi-cultural city, everyone has relatives abroad whether its extended Irish family, West Indians or deep connections within the Chinese diaspora. Which is why I was surprised that Patriotic Alternative managed to stir up so much trouble against an asylum hotel in the Knowsley area of Liverpool.
The city does have a certain degree of prejudice; primarily sectarianism. Its one of the few areas in England that has a marching season rather like Northern Ireland with an Orange Order parade held annual in Southport back when I lived up there. But Knowsley was something else. Patriotic Alternative managed to do something that I never thought was possible in cities like Liverpool or Bristol.
So reading about the event and the role of Patriotic Alternative in Dazed was an eye opener. It portrayed a city that I no longer recognised. Patriotic Alternative apparently organised the protest on a Telegram channel. What Dazed claim happened is that mainstream political statements and mainstream media coverage created an environment ripe for trouble makers like Patriotic Alternative.
According to Hope Not Hate, Patriotic Alternative shared members with prescribed far right organisation National Action. For an organisation that has a couple of hundred core members Patriotic Alternative has an outsized footprint. This footprint seems to be driven by the Patriotic Alternative Telegram channel with some 5,000 followers
Consumers in the 1970s on the changing nature of growing old, unfortunately attitudes and biases haven’t improved in the last 50 years.
Economics
US chip packaging firm Amkor closes its Shanghai plant for a week amid global market downturn | South China Morning Post – this is signalling a recession, as was AP shipments to Chinese smartphone brands stay in decline in 1Q23, says DIGITIMES Research – Fourth-quarter 2022 smartphone application processor (AP) shipments to China-based smartphone vendors amounted to 137 million units, plunging 24% from the prior quarter and 20.3% from the prior year, and will continue to experience a double-digit decline in the first quarter of 2023, according to figures from DIGITIMES Research’s latest report covering smartphone AP shipments. Because of shrinking demand and high smartphone inventory at the channel in both China and emerging markets, AP shipments to China-based smartphone vendors had already experienced on-year declines for five consecutive quarters
How China Fell In Love With Cheap Wine | Sixth Tone – reminds me of my time working on the Bordeaux wine marketing board as an account at the agency I worked for in Hong Kong. The work was focused on mainland China and promoted Bordeaux as a lifestyle brand for wine consumption rather than just gift giving
Massachusetts Democratic organ donation proposal sounds like prisoner organ harvesting. | Slate – Democratic state representatives Carlos González and Judith García introduced legislation that would allow incarcerated people to go home early—if they “donated” their organs. Specifically, the bill would “allow eligible incarcerated individuals to gain not less than 60 and not more than 365-day reduction in the length of their committed sentence” if they “donated bone marrow or organ(s).” Gonzalez argued that the bill was a step towards advancing racial equity in health care and making it easier for people of color to obtain transplants.
Hong Kong
The Hong Kong government must break its habit of relying on property developers | South China Morning Post – the article itself isn’t that interesting, but the author is. Regina Ip would be what the conservative party in the UK would call a big beast. She is a former minister level politician in the pro-China camp. Add to this the fact that despite mainland Chinese companies now outnumber local and foreign firms in Hong Kong and the economy is in decline. I expect Ip’s op-ed to be the tip of an iceberg of a shift in economic drivers that will occur sometime after John Lee leaves office. The clock is ticking on the big five families to diversify their wealth out of Hong Kong and China, following Jardines example to go into Indonesia might be a prudent start
Hong Kong reopens with post-Covid charm offensive | Financial Times – Johannes Hack, president of Hong Kong’s German Chamber of Commerce, who sits on a new task force to promote the city, said a “long-haul” effort to change business perceptions would have to go beyond plane ticket giveaways. “If you have relocated corporate functions to another place, half a year later you are probably not going to reverse the whole thing,” he said. “People who have moved to Singapore with their teen kids, there is no way they are going to do that again . . . They are not going to come back.” – feeds into the ‘its just another city in China now’ narrative
UK universities starting to lose allure for Chinese | News | The Times – well that’s screwed the Ponzi scheme that universities have engaged in via over-priced student accommodation real estate investments for reasons that aren’t exactly clear given their ownership structure and charters
Japanese fashion magazine Popteen ends physical version, switches to web installments instead – move to online only and moving away from monthly updates. Popteen ended its physical publishing as of February 1, 2023, with the February 2023 edition (released on December 28, 2022) being its last. web-based articles will be released on the first and the 15th of every month, known as “Popteen media”, and full editions of the fashion magazine will be updated a few times annually. The main reason for switching to the web edition was to make the magazine more accessible to middle and high-school students, who may not receive an allowance or be able to work part-time to afford physical copies of Popteen
Great video on microchip counterfeiting and recycling. The Japanese are doing some of the best work authenticating chips. Also if its bad for US defence contractors, just imagine how bad it will be for the sanctioned Russian defence sector.
Seeing for the Sightless – Luo, 26, suffers from congenital cataracts and is pursuing a degree in acupuncture and massage therapy at a college in Beijing. He needs help on the scales as there is no voice assistant function at the training center. On a mobile app called Be My Eyes (BME), he sends out a video call. Pointing his phone camera at the scales, he asks, “Hello, can you read the number for me, please?” A volunteer on the other end tells him, “91 kg.” Luo says thanks and hangs up. Usually, these exchanges only last a few seconds. Being tech savvy, Luo wrote a program back in high school to help the visually impaired memorize English vocabulary, something he himself struggled with. The app would randomly pick a word from a list he composed and he would spell it out after hearing the word. BME, developed by Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a visually impaired man from Denmark, drew Luo’s attention as soon as the Android version was available in China in 2017. Currently, there are 445,000 visually impaired users from all over the world and more than six million volunteers on BME.
Style
Adidas Tumbles as Losses From Its Kanye West Venture Pile Up – The New York Times – interesting how badly Ivy Park is doing and this on their business in China: Adidas in China: a brand seeking its redemption – In the second half of 2022, Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted estimated losses of revenue of more than 35% in the Chinese market. He declared that such a violent drop was caused by some mistakes. For instance, the struggle of keeping up with the local brands, the failed recovery after the zero-covid policy, and the scandal of Xinjiang cotton.After the winter Olympics, the trend of Guochao, or the “national trend”, started to develop. More young Chinese consumers prefer buying local brands rather than western sportswear brands. In August 2022, the local firm, Anta, overtook Nike and became the biggest sportswear brand in China with a revenue of more than USD3.79 billion. Li-Ning, another Chinese firm, also registered revenue of USD1.76 billion against Adidas’ USD1.72 billion, pushing the German brand out of the podium. The zero-Covid policy has been a big problem for Adidas. In 2022, the company had to deal with closed shops and rising costs. In particular, the general lockdown which paralyzed China for the last few years resulted in the desegregation of the complex system of supply chains built up by the German brand. The disrupted supply chains cost Adidas a loss of USD427 million in the first quarter of 2022.
SMIC expects 10-12% revenue drop in 1Q23 | DigiTimes – China-based pure-play foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) expects to post a revenue decline of 10-12% sequentially in the first quarter of 2023, with gross margin falling further to 19-21%.
MotherDuck: Big Data is Dead – Jordan Tigani spent ten years working on Google BigQuery, during which time he was surprised to learn that the median data storage size for regular customers was much less than 100GB. In this piece he argues that genuine Big Data solutions are relevant to a tiny fraction of companies, and there’s way more value in solving problems for everyone else. I’ve been talking about Datasette as a tool for solving “small data” problems for a while
