All bets are off – Kaiser Kuo – China Speakers Bureau

Kaiser Kuo
by Fons1 via Flickr“All bets are off now that the credit crisis is lapping at China’s shores,” says Kaiser Kuo, group director digital strategies of Ogilvy in Beijing in an interview with Adam Schokora.

With funding as tight as it’s going to be in the time frame, you specify, we’ll see a big die-off of companies already in operation, particularly in capital-intensive sectors like Internet video, and we’ll see very few new startups in the Internet space overall getting funded.That doesn’t mean there won’t be new startups: they’ll just have to be even scrappier, even better at keeping burn low, and revenue-generating pretty much right out of the gate. Any companies that were planning on going that old route of racking up tens of millions of users and then thinking about how to monetize, or assuming they’d have the media agencies beating down their doors and falling over each other to buy inventory, are going to have to seriously rethink their business models.

More at 56minus1.com, on innovation at China’s startup’s (“rare exception”), on C2C (“Taobao will hold the lead”) and of course: censorship. (“freedom of speech advocates are barking up the wrong tree in China”)

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Kaiser Kuo is one of the celebrity speakers at the China Speakers Bureau. It you are interested in having him as a speaker, do let us know. Zhang Lijia
by Fons1 via Flickr