Battle of the Titans

Far and away the most interesting session of the CEFCO exhibitions industry conference so far was the technology debate yesterday afternoon which pitted the new President of Alibaba.com's B2B division, David Wei, against Global Sources COO Craig Pepples and HC International founder and CEO Guo Fansheng. Given that Global Sources now owns 10% of HC, you could argue that the decks were somewhat stacked against Wei who is still feeling his way into the job having recently switched over from his previous position as China CEO for the UK hardware stores, B&Q.

Despite this, honours were probably pretty even at the end. Wei came out fighting with a strong statement that Alibaba.com is committed never to launch an exhibitions business itself unlike, he pointed out bluntly, his competitor at the table. He suggested that it was a low margin business they didn't want to get into. I was surprised to hear that. Print media may be low margin but large and successful trade fairs are anything but.

Pepples, surprising the large audience with the fluency of his Mandarin Chinese, argued that 1+1+1 = more than three referring to Global Sources' integrated print, online and trade fair offering.

Guo was more direct in his attack on Alibaba, suggesting that it was not appropriate for a Chinese web business to be owned by foreign investors (Alibaba.com has long had VC investment from the US and Japan as well as now being part-owned by Yahoo!). His company, he said was more than 50% owned by its employees. Careful classification of B2B categories was, he said, the secret of HC's success adding that, although the company had withdrawn from organising exhibitions, they would do it themselves if they could. Echoing Pepples with a slightly different formula, he said that HC is always open to partnership but only if 1+1 = at least 2.