....resting

This blog will be taking a break for the next two weeks while we escape the heat and humidity of Hong Kong's mid summer. Back in action on 1st August...unless something catches our eye and we e-mail it in before then.

Baidu listing to go ahead

Mercury News Silicon Beat reporter Matt Marshall pulls together a good report on the proposed $80 million NASDAQ listing of Baidu, China's premier home-grown search engine. It would appear that the speculation which was rife two weeks ago that Google CEO Eric Schmidt, following a visit to Baidu's Beijing offices, would pre-empt the IPO with a buyout offer was either off the mark or an excellent piece of work by the firm's PR advisers to stir up interest.

Jack Morton Worldwide Appoints New MD for Asia

This press release gives details of further expansion of the professionalisation of event marketing in Asia. George P. Johnson has been quietly gearing up for several years and Jack Morton has now taken a GPJ veteran, Ben Taylor, to head up its Asia operations from Hong Kong.

Bloomberg India

An interesting summary of Bloomberg's India plans here on Contentsutra:

Bloomberg To Kick Of Indian Operations:

"Business Standard: Bloomberg, the US-based data, business news and analysis provider, has finalised its plan for India operations. Bloomberg LP, US, will charge its wholly-owned Indian subsidiary, to be set up in Mumbai, an annual fee of $3 million (Rs 1.30 crore) in the first year of operation and $1 million (Rs 43.6 lakh) for TV programming and software production business.

The Indian operation, which is expected to initially have 50 employees, will also pay a lumpsum fee of $2 million (Rs 8.72 crore) to the parent for technology collaboration, according to the documents filed by the company with the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB). Bloomberg will invest Rs 65 lakh ($1,51,000) towards the equity capital of the Indian operation which will produce TV programmes and deliver to one and more Indian channels authorised to telecast financial news in English."

(Via ContentSutra.)

Asian B2B benchmarks

An interesting Asian twist to this post from Paul Conley on being a B2B benchmark. He comments:

Reed Business' ICIS is launching something called the ICIS-LOR Ethylene Index (EIX). The index will be used as the benchmark settlement price at the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange for the world's first over-the-counter (OTC) ethylene futures contract.
That's the sort of brand-name recognition that should be the goal of every B2B publisher.

ICIS-LOR is also establishing some highly-targetted positions for itself in China with a series of very specialised alliances with companies such as HC International.

Focus Media - China's largest Nasdaq IPO

FinanceAsia.com reports today on China's largest Nasdaq IPO. Focus Media is an interesting company which has placed screens, usually in the lift lobby, of over 8,500 commercial buildings around major cities in China and Hong Kong. The prospect of addressing a captive audience of business people waiting for a ride up to their offices has proven attractive to advertisers and, it seems, to investors on NASDAQ. The company raised $172 million, the FinanceAsia report says.

Another, similar company, Target Media, is set to list later this year. Before the Focus listing, they were looking to raise $150 million. Perhaps sights will now be set higher still.

Association spins off Singapore furniture fair

We were interested to receive today a press release from the Singapore Furniture Industries Association. It's furniture fair is the most important in south-east Asia and has been spun off into a private company. Pico subisdiary Meeting Planners has bought 40% of the new business. The Association's Quek Chin Tuan becomes CEO of the new company, International Furniture Fair Singapore Pte Ltd.

The new team has plans to build the fair from its current size where it occupies 55,000 square metres at the Singapore Expo venue to take up the full 100,000 square metres which will be available by 2009.

Impact of VNU deal

David Shaw picks up on the point that had grabbed my attention concerning VNU's huge ($7 billion) acquisition of IMS, the market-leading medical market research firm:

A View on VNU:

VNU: The New Face Of Trade Publishing

The good bloggers at Shore Communications have an interesting analysis of the VNU acquisition of IMS.

Key grab: The new model in trade publishing centers on a mix of analytical research, consulting services, and conferences with traditional publishing products like research reports and periodicals included in the mix, but not playing the starring role.

(Via B or not 2B--A Business Media Blog.)

Having spent that much money, we assume that the VNU management is going to be rather focused on the challenges of achieving synergies between IMS and AC Neilson (with which good luck!). Can't imagine our friends in the publishing and events division getting to large a slice of whatever cake is left for business development or, for that matter, top management attention.

Mind you, this may take some of the heat off China business development leaving the teams there to get on with trying to build there businesses one step at a time.

Update: have a look also at Paul Conley's posting on this with some interesting insights into the type of deal it is.

CMP Asia team resurfaces at PriMetrica

At least a couple of members of CMP Asia's disbanded hi-tech publishing team have re-emerged at research firm PriMetrica's recently-acquired MMS subsidiary in Singapore. Adrian Hoon will be the unit's General Manager and, amongst other things, is responsible for the relaunched cmpnetasia.com portal, now operating as an offshot of CMP Media's home site in the US.

Singapore bouncing back

Just got back from a few days meetings in Singapore which finally seems to be coming out of a long funk about losing out to China. Interesting, then to see this report in the FT about the economy re-bounding: Singapore's economy rebounds in second quarter:

Singapore's economy grew at a seasonally adjusted annualised rate of 12.3 percent in the second quarter, boosted by a strong performance in the services sector and a pick-up in manufacturing.

The rise in gross domestic product (GDP) -- the total value of all goods and services in the economy -- was double the forecast of 6.6 percent growth in a Reuters poll.
Analysts said the economy had likely bottomed out during the June quarter and were looking for stronger growth in the second half of the year, driven mainly by manufacturing and a solid improvement in services.

"These were a fairly strong set of figures, thanks mostly to the services sector," said Joseph Tan, economist with Standard Chartered."

Like Hong Kong, all the media companies we visited last week were running flat out to keep up with demand all over Asia. The clear message, "if you can't make money now, you never will".