600 Million Chinese internet users use their mobile phone to pay, and increasingly they use not the traditional banks and credit cards, but newcomers in the industry. Innovation expert William Bao Bean discusses what will happen to the traditional banks when mobile payments advance also outside China.Read More →
How deep are the pockets of the People´s Bank of China (PBOC) to keep on funding its financial system? According to economist Arthur Kroeber they are safe for another year, and can use the time to clean up the current mess. Learning how to communicate with the markets is one talent that needs urgent development, he tells Bloomberg.Read More →
Chinese companies have often been blamed for copying Western innovation and patents. But now China takes the lead in mobile innovations, the argument seems to go the other way. Many of the features we know from WeChat we see now popping up at Facebook. Innovator William Bao Bean discusses whether Facebook has become a WeChat clone.Read More →
Erasing the middle management and organizing competition internally: those are two features in new revolutionary corporate structures in China. Haier and Tencent have made big inroads. Innovation expert William Bao Bean discusses Tencent and how their organization works.Read More →
Luxury spending might have been hit by Xi Jinping´s anti-corruption campaign, but travel is on the way up. Rupert Hoogewerf just published his 5th China Luxury Travel Report and sees the super rich spending more time and money on more trips. Technology and luxury travel agencies set the trends, he tells Thoughtful China.Read More →
Huawei has replaced Xiaomi as the preferred mobile in China. Is you want to be cool, you buy Apple, if you want a decent local product, you buy Huawei, says business analyst Shaun Rein in Yahoo Finance. Xiaomi is still a good company, but US$45 billion might be a little bit high, he says.Read More →
Alibaba bought the video-services Youku-Tudou, a mash of Youtube and Netflix, but at least ten times bigger, tells business analyst Shaun Rein in Bloomberg. It is a sign competition between internet giants in China is heating up, and Alibaba first want to strengthen its position there, before taking the rest of the world serious, Rein says.Read More →
Chinese are looking for new meanings in their life, says journalist Ian Johnson. They are looking for religious values, both condoned by the government or illegal, but also shop around for other spiritual values. And mostly the government supports that search, as long as there are no foreign links.Read More →
Now China is preparing for a new megacity, Jing-Jin-Ji, combining Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei, the neighboring provincial capital Baoding is hoping to ride on the bandwagon too. Journalist Ian Johnson visited Baoding for the New York Times and looks at its chances.Read More →
Google, Ebay and Amazon are just some of the tech giants who failed in China. With a good preparation that would not have happened, claims William Bao Bean, managing director of the ChinaAccelarator. His organization prepares startups for launches in China, and Chinese firms for going global.Read More →
Financial analyst Sara Hsu strongly disagrees with former US ambassador to the UN John Bolt as he accuses China it manipulated its currency by the recent devaluation. China is just doing what politicians in Washington have asked them to do, Hsu argues in PressTV. “They wanted China to become more market oriented.”Read More →
Some see the devaluation of the yuan as a panic measure by the Chinese government to reignite growth, but market analyst Ben Cavender tells the Guardian why the depreciation is mainly market driven, making the yuan freer from the US dollar peg.Read More →