New BSG report released

There's a press release on our latest report on M&A activities in Asia over on our corporate blog.

China Finance Online dives in with China Telecom

I have had my doubts about China Finance Online. It's a small company which has struggled to define a compelling strategy and justify its NASDAQ listing.

So, it's very interesting to see, less than 10 days after the Xinhua PR Newswire deal with Kong.net, the China Finance (JRJC) is linking up with China Telecom. The deal is designed to "to deliver a variety of compelling financial information services to more than 40 million broadband users across China Telecom’s internet platform and offline distribution network". It goes on to note that "CFO will provide accurate, timely and comprehensive financial content to “JRJC-Vnet Finance”, the co-branded finance channel, and develop subscription-based financial information and analytical products, including free-trial and fee-based versions, dedicated to China Telecom’s broadband subscribers. China Telecom will distribute CFO’s products through the Vnet portal as well as its over 10 thousand business halls, and the two parties will split the revenues according to the agreed-upon scheme under the alliance agreement".

We'll be watching the next few quarters with great interest. Stock watching site Seeking Alpha thinks this is a great deal. "As the reality of the strategic alliance surfaces, the stock has tremendous potential to form legs and continue the run. Given the fact that China Telecom’s 40 million broadband subscribers only comprise 20% of its total customer base, the number of subscribers to the financial portal can only continue to grow", it says.

Thoughts from Dubai

When I posted a couple of pictures from the deserts of Dubai last week, I promised an explanation. Travel and other work commitments have delayed that explanation for which apologies.

I was at the 6th International CEO Forum, an annual event for the top dogs in the exhibitions industry. It was being held outside Europe for the first time and attracted around 85 participants.

Dubai is clearly an attraction. The market grew 25% last year according to Sandy Angus of Andry Montgomery and by a factor of 5 in the past decade. The huge new Exhibition City is now under construction to give room for expected future growth. The country continues to predict 11% annual GDP growth and a representative of the government told delegates that they were now spending half of their budget on improving transport links which have become strained by the city's success.

Economist Roger Martin-Fagg from Henley Management College is a popular speaker at these events, being able to translate better than most the complex gyrations of the global economy into concepts easily grasped by business people. His projections:

• The US will be in full-fledged recession in Q4 2008 and Q1 2009.
• The traditional link between economic growth and oil prices will be re-established and, as a result the price of oil will begin to drop. Even if it goes down to $60, that won't affect too much growth prospects for the Middle East which can survive very happily at that price level.
• The key economies will begin to grow in mid-2009.
• UK property prices will fall 7% in 2008.
• The downturn in Japan will be sharper than either the US or the UK.
• India is a better long term prospect than China because he does not see domestic consumption in the latter kicking in hard enough. I don't agree with him on that.
• By the end of 2008, the Euro/US$ exchange rate will be $1.60.

It will be good to come back to those in a year or two to see how he did. I reckon he's right on most of them.

The riddle of the sands....UFI in Dubai

More soon on why these leaders of the world's exhibitions industry are lost in the desert and what they hoped to find out.

Peering into the future of business information

I have had the pleasure over the past couple of years to participate on the sidelines of the formation of a new industry association, the Business Information Industry Association Asia/Pacific and Middle East, or BIIA. It is currently holding its annual Credit Management and Information Forum in Hong Kong.

Yesterday, the group's members met and were given an overview of developments in global business information trends by Chairman, David Worlock of Outsell. David is predicting a gradually slowing of growth in some sectors of the information industry including some falls, "for the first time" in some sectors of the digital media business. With the exception of search, most parts of the business are expected to grow as slowly as 3.5% in the next 2 - 3 years....glacial by the standards of the digital industry.

As I do, David believes that mobile is the big untapped opportunity in business information. How much more true is that in this part of the world even than in Europe and north America. Alongside that, information companies will have to learn to work with software providers as they strive to integrate their data into workflow.

As usual these days, Alibaba come up in conversation as a potential 'unexpected' competitor. It has just launched a seller credit service with China Construction Bank and, just days before that, the launch of a SaaS marketplace. Both of these are key components of the future business model Worlock is predicting and Alibaba's reach into the 10s of millions of Chinese SMEs makes it a powerful player that the large, traditional business information providers, tied as they are into the western corporate model, may find hard to match in China.

Dig deeper Singapore

Physorg.com reports that the Singapore government is launching an 8 month competition to develop a new, world-beating multi-media search engine. The prize for the winner is $100,000. "Contestants are required", he report says, "to create a search engine that can identify search terms found not only in text within websites, but in music and video files as well".

Sounds like the holy grail of search engine development to me.

Bloggers altogether more distinguished and expert than I, including searchengineland and Googleguru John Battelle, question whether 8 months is really long enough and whether the prize correctly reflects the scale of the challenge.

Come on Singapore. You just had a record year. Dig deeper. Add a few zeros. That will really get the bright sparks flying.

Squatting in Macau

I spent Friday in Macau and stayed the night at the Venetian. Very nice it was too.

With Macau's success and its 27 million visitors in 2007, the ferries have become more and more crowded. The Venetian's parent, Las Vegas Sands, has been trying to alleviate the impact of this by launching its own ferry service, CotaiJet.

This has been hampered by some mysterious legal challenges which smack of dirty tricks. Destination Macau reports on the resumption of service. Scan down to the bottom of the piece, though, as you'll see that the dirty tricks are perhaps not entirely over. Somebody (we offer only very short odds on correctly guessing who) is 'squatting' on the obvious domain name cotaijet.com, leaving punters having to remember the slightly less obvious com.mo address.

Ah well, as the Venetian nears welcoming its 8 millionth visitor, they can presumably indulge in the luxury of regarding this as a minor fly in the ointment.

XPRN and mobile

It's been a while since I posted on mobile media and business information (click on the "Mobile" label to see some of the older ones). It's a topic that continues to niggle with me though. So many phones and so few interesting business applications.

It was interesting, then to see this announcement from Xinhua PR Newswire, the jv between Xinhua Finance and United Business Media's PR Newswire. They're linking up with NASDAQ-listed Kong.net to add "XPRN's entire daily corporate press release file to Kong.net's 40 million subscriber base". The releases will then be available to all mobile phone users that use Kong.net for browsing and searching.

XPRN Director Yujie Chen is quoted as saying that adding Kong.net "is especially important due to the ability to reach mobile phone users in large numbers".

Kong.net is building out a financial channel and we'll watch with interest to see if others sign up as real business information suppliers.

Back on line

Apologies for the 'radio silence' in the past few days. I've been in Chengdu and find it disconcerting that, while in China, I can post to the blog via blogger.com but can't read it through blogspot.com which remains fully jammed.

I was in Chengdu for the annual CEFCO conference - China's biggest meeting for the exhibitions industry which regularly pulls in an audience of 650 or so. It's a good opportunity to catch up with industry friends and contacts from around China and around the world.

The organisers have worked hard over the past couple of years to put on a more engaging and interesting series of sessions and I've have to say that they seem to me largely to have succeeded. I moderated a panel discussion with CMP Asia' s Jimé Essink, Messe Munich's Manfred Wutzlhofer, last year's UFI President and former Cologne Messe CEO Jochen Witt and CIEC's Zhu Heping. They gave varied accounts of their view of the opportunity for exhibitions represented by China. All basically agreed that the rapid explosion of business seen in the past 10 years has to begin to give way to a greater focus on improved professional standards and a greater focus on customer satisfaction. In his annual report on the Chinese exhibitions industry, CCPIT Vice Chairman Wang Jinzhen told delegates frankly that exhibitor satisfaction with fairs in China is declining.

On a less serious note, this is now the 2nd time I've visited Chengdu and not managed to get to see the pandas. A return visit is clearly called for. There is a huge exhibition centre there and Business Media China is announcing a new partnership with them. So, I have an excuse.

Next year in January, the 5th CEFCO will take place in Nanjing. I expect I'll be there.

Mark of success for Macau jewellery fair

CMP has just run its first jewellery fair in Macau. I'll be interested to hear reports of how people think it went although it clearly had good support from the Israeli diamond trade as well as Hong Kong jewellers.

For years now, the big jewellery fairs in Hong Kong have generated regular (and fairly similar) stories about ambitious efforts to relieve the exhibitors of their jewels. In some cases, it has appeared to be more an effort to relieve the insurance companies of their profits.

However, you might argue that the fact that jewel thieves appear to have targeted CMP's brand new show - or so this Macau Daily Times piece would have us believe - is a sign that it is already being taken seriously by all elements in the jewellery trade.