China and India linked via Thailand

I started off reading a fairly old story from my old friends at Express Computer about Alibaba's "Open Sesame" event in Mumbai last month. Interesting stuff and I had a bit of a poke around Alibaba's Indian channel.

I then noticed that this had taken place during the 5th China Products Exhibition at the Mumbai Grand Hyatt (well, to be precise, in a tent outside the Mumbai Grand Hyatt). This is officially organised by CCPIT as you would expect. What caught my eye, though, was that it is actually managed by Worldex India Exhibition & Promotion Pvt Ltd. Worldex is Thai company whose main business is selling space to Thai companies in over-seas shows. They're pretty good at it.

Interesting then, that they should be moving into event management in India. It's a market that appeals to Thai companies. We know that Khun Ladda's NCC exhibitions team is also active there. I am assuming that we'll see more of these 2 or 3 way ventures between Asian companies as the intra-Asian trades become increasingly important...particularly if the N. American export market falls off its perch.

Not moving hand-in-hand after all

We've been talking in the office over the past few weeks about how the share prices of Global Sources and Alibaba appear to have started moving almost in tandem. We took a closer look at that today and found out that it wasn't quite as true as we'd thought.

Until early-December, they were really joined at the hip but, as this Yahoo! Finance chart shows they have since diverged. Although the prices move in similar patterns, Global Sources is down about 18% since Alibaba's Day 1 close while Alibaba itself is now down 40%. As we write, it's trending up a little bit with the market.

New Suntec boss

When I blogged Warren Buckley's departure back in November, I suggested that the gamblers amongst you might place your chips on the appointment of Pieter Idenburg to full his shoes. I wish my own bets were on the mark more often but was pleased to see the announcement that Pieter will, indeed, be stepping up to the Suntec hot seat.

Congratulations Pieter. We wish you well.

Perhaps somebody there can send me a bigger picture. This was the biggest one I could pinch from the web today.

Asia B2B M&A up 70% in 2007

Slowly, but surely, the Asian B2B media M&A scene is creeping onto the radar. Our tracking of deals in 2007 saw an almost 70% increase in value to US$456 million, up from $269 million in 2006. Average deal value was well up at $15.7 million (although that's still pretty small) over 29 deals, up from 22 in 2006.

More detailed analysis will be sent to our Asia Business Media Tracker Service subscribers later this month. If you want to see this report, let us know.

Predictions for 2008: 37 deals worth $650 million. For the record, we predicted 25 transactions and a deal value of $300 – 350 million in 2007. So, we weren't too far off the mark on deal numbers but way under-estimated total value. Let's hope for another year like that in 2008!

B2B transactions soaring in China

There's a very interesting piece on the China Daily site which reports B2B transactions rising sharply in the PRC. It reports:

Business-to-business (B2B) transactions hit 1,250 billion yuan ($168.9 billion) in China last year, up 25.5 percent from 2006, according to a survey released on Tuesday.

The "Netguide 2008" survey, which provides a wrap-up of 2007, polled more than 300 web sites and about 200 enterprises, with 50,786 interviewees around the country.

It goes on to note the Alibaba.com has a 70% market share.

Continued steady growth is expected with the report forecasting that "China's B2B trade volume will exceed 1,620 billion yuan in 2008 and 2,130 billion yuan in 2009". That's 30% this year and 31% next.

Now, if the media sites can start to work out ways to take some share of these transactions rather than just facilitating them, then there's clearly much money to be made. Unfortunately, the B2B media has been grappling with that conundrum since about 1996 and doesn't seem to have made too much progress.

Jasubhai Digital Media sold

This one has taken a couple of weeks to filter its way through to me but I note with great interest the Shah family's decision to sell its Jasubhai Digital Media subsidiary. The company has been acquired by 9.9 Mediaworx for an undisclosed sum and is to be re-named 9.9 Digital Media.

According to a Business Standard article just before the deal, 9.9 was established by former ABP CEO Pramath Sinha. ABP is the publisher of Businessworld magazine.

ZDNet India, which is run by Jasubhai Digital Media, quoted Sinha saying "We believe that the media industry in India is at its infancy and niche, sharply targeted media brands such as those of JDM have exponential growth opportunities." The article also notes that "the Jasubhai Group will continue to have interest in the business through a financial stake in 9.9 Media".

Of Barack, toys and Hong Kong

I don't want to be the only blogger in the world not mentioning Obama's thrashing of Hilary in Iowa. Somewhat off-target for our blog, but there is a connection and here goes:

1. Sen. Obama, far closer in age to being a toy-user than any of his opponents, said just before Christmas that he thinks that Chinese toys are nasty and should be banned. By 23rd December, he had retreated a little from that position.
2. The fact that his position was ridiculous is made clear by this Hong Kong Standard piece about prospects for the toy industry which notes that "86 percent of toys sold in the US market are made in China".
3. The piece also refers to next week's Toy Fair, the first big exhibition of the year in Hong Kong. It will be an interesting event to watch for any signs of fall-out from last year's toy safety scandals and the threat of a slowing US economy.
   

The year of un-conferences

I wrote last in November about the evolution of the conference away from Powerpoint and talking heads. In that post, I wrote "Nobody though, as far as I can see, has really come up with quite the right solution to making these events marketable, truly valuable and profitable for the organisers".

Well things seem to be changing fast. CMP Media in the US just paid US$1.2 million (with a possible $3.8 million more to come) for Mass Events, an 'un-conference' business. And, one of America's most respected magazine and B2B bloggers, Rex Hammock is speculating today that 2008 will be a big year for the "unconference" business. Such a big year, in fact, that he thinks we'll be begging for the phrase to be banished by the end of the year. I think I already am. What a silly word.

Rex's post is tongue-in-cheek, but it does highlight the degree to which conference and business event organisers are deeply nervous that their simple recipe for reaping profits doesn't taste so good any more to those who have to pay.

We will be watching carefully for the evolution of this trend in Asia into profitable business.

One we missed

Thanks to CMP Asia's Mike Tan for pointing us towards an acquisition that we missed last year: Suntec Singapore's sales of its events business, Suntec Integrated Media to a new Singapore-based company. It's now known as TMX Show Productions and is run by Herman Ho.

The press release is here and I shall send myself to the bottom of the class as punishment for paying insufficient attention. There are certainly lots of changes afoot over at Suntec with Warren Buckley's return to Canada and Marketing Director Elena Arabadjieva heading off to the Genting project on Sentosa.

TDC predicts "challenging" 2008

HKTDC's chief economist Edward Leung can be seen here making his predictions for 2008. He expects Hong Kong export growth to drop from 9% in 2007 to 5-7% in 2008. He thinks that digital electronics and jewellery exports to Europe will be the hot sectors this year.

Who knew, by the way, that our friends at the TDC have their own YouTube page. How very trendy of them!