Oops!

Some of you may have been following with interest the fortunes of Frankfurt-listed Business Media China. Having fiddled around with a variety of unrelated exhibition acquisitions, the company had decided that it would focus development on outdoor with a very interesting sounding series of deals for railway station and airport advertising.

Tim Johnson's China Rising Blog is frequently good reading although it rarely touches directly on our B2B sector. On this occasion, however, his post today set us thinking. From this, we gather that there has been a massive clampdown in Beijing at least on outdoor advertising. He quotes the China Times saying:

“The Beijing Municipal government is undertaking a campaign to clear out all the outdoor billboards on the city's main roads, dismantling those already set up by private companies. The work was started last year, when companies were asked to dismantle illegal billboards themselves. Since this April, employees of the city's administration started to tear down the remaining ones by force. It took them a whole week to dismantle an 86-meter-long, seven-meter-high billboard on the Third Ring Road, the biggest one in Beijing.”

Johnson believes that the Communist Party has had enough of outdoor advertising - at least in Beijing. Oh dear!