Santa moves on to Dubai

As the China Sourcing Fairs in Hong Kong draw to a close, Global Sources shows no signs of letting up the momentum in its relatively new exhibitions business with the announcement of a June 2007 China Sourcing Fair in Dubai.

Global Sources Chairman and CEO Merle Hinrichs is quoted in the announcement saying that “China is Dubai’s number-one trade partner, with Dubai importing more than US$12 billion worth of goods from China in the past five years".

Signing in Hong Kong on behalf of Dubai World Trade Centre was General Manager - Commercial, Christina Anthony. She worked in Hong Kong in 2004 as a consultant to the start-up team at AsiaWorld-Expo, the venue of Global Sources' Hong Kong China Sourcing Fairs.

Christmas comes early to Hong Kong

To say that postings has been intermittent would be an under-statement. Very heavy business travel plus an Easter holiday sailing from Hong Kong to Subic Bay in the Philippines are my excuse.

As you can see from this photo, Christmas came a little early to Hong Kong this morning when Global Sources opened its China Sourcing Fair, Gifts & Home Products at the new AsiaWorld-Expo venue. It claims the fair is the largest ever held in Hong Kong, filling every part of the 70,000 sq. metre centre. 3,800 booths and an expected 30,000 visitors. That's on top of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council's Homeware show already filling the HKCEC in downtown Wanchai.

Indian business magazines lose readers

Exchange4media.com reports that the Indian Readership Survey shows that all business magazines have seen readership declines.

Apparently, Business Today is the top title with 716,000 readers, a decline of 5% from 2005. Business India has 526,000 readers, down 8%. Business World dropped furthest of the majors, down 10% at 335,000. Outlook Money fell 32% to 191,000.The only title bucking the trend is Dalal Street Investment Journal, up by 8% at 82,000. The article notes that this is probably due to the strong performance of India's stock market in the past 12 months.

BSG's Asia B2B stock indices

Hugo Martin has given us a generous plug in his excellent blog on Media, Marketing and Internet. He talks about the share price table we produce in our weekly newsletter which tracks Asian-headquartered, listed B2B media companies and those based elsewhere with activities in Asia (there are 35 companies altogether in our tracking system).

We have a simple index which tracks the performance of all of them. It is unweighted so somewhat swayed by the wild gyrations of the smaller stocks but it makes interesting reading. Over the past 12 months, you would have been slightly worse off with a portolio of pure Asian B2B media stocks:



You'll need to click on this to make it easier to read, but the blue line is the Asian stocks. As you can see, there's not much in it over the last year.

Year-to-date, however, is a different story and things are looking pretty good for the Asian stocks since January:

CMP back on the acquisition trail in Asia

Unless I've missed a few, the year has got off to a quiet start on the M&A front. CMP Asia, in partnership with Bologna Fiere, squeezed one into the first quarter with its purchase of a controlling interest in the Guangzhou Beauty Fair for a reported $7 million. This fair is a very strong event and has been built up over a decade or so by the fearsomely energetic Mme. Ma Ya. Good for her!

CMP and Bologna have worked together for many years on the Cosmoprof Asia event in Hong Kong and have now announced a spin-off Cosmoprof Shanghai show.

The company's last deal was in November last year when it acquired the Tokyo Jewellery Fair.