Different insight on Baidu vs. Google in China

I have noticed a lot of posts over the past few days about CNNIC's report that Baidu now has 74% market share in China. The general tenor of these is that it's another US Internet giant about to lose its shirt in China to good little feisty local competition. Lots of people like this story (think eBay vs. Taobao).

However, the China Search Ads blog has a somewhat different take on this. Their perspective is:

However the interesting story is Google. TradingMarkets.com report that among educated, older and more prosperous users Google is almost drawing even - which would start to explain why their return on investment tends to be higher than Baidu.

Now, cynics would say that there's a long history in business media of falling back on the quality argument when your numbers are bad. This may be, but it's rarely hard to generate big audiences in China. Whether all of those people actually have any money to spend is often an entirely different matter.

Global Sources links up with Pico in India

A final quick snippet for the day, but a very interesting one: Global Sources has licensed the China Sourcing Fair brand to Pico who will launch two fairs at the Bombay Exhibition Centre in India. This will take them up to 15 CSFs in 2008.

White hats for the good guys

...or at least I assume that must have been the thinking behind Hong Kong Trade Development Council's choice of colour for the safety helmets offered to the great and good of the exhibition and construction industries today. The 'inauguration' of Phase 2.5 of the Convention & Exhibition Centre attracted a good crowd and blazing, midday sun.

As you can see, Global Source's Sarah Benecke pulled off the construction helmet with somewhat more panache than the remainder of this motley crew. Andrew Kay of CP Exhibitions, next to Sarah, is the only person I know with a PhD in the exhibition industry. Then there's CMP's Michael Duck, Munich's Ronald Unterburger and Arthur Spurdle, long-associated with Messe Frankfurt.

The Phase 2.5 project is certainly a dramatic engineering exercise, spanning 100 metres of the harbour and turning what was previously a narrow bridge, linking the first two phases into 20,000 sq. metres of additional space. Oh, and I should add that 'inauguration' in this case meant the ceremonial tightening of a nut on one of the steel girders which will in due course support the new halls.

HKTDC chairman Peter Woo was talking in square feet today (the numbers sound bigger) and told the audience that the HKCEC would only be taken seriously if it joined the "million square feet club". It was Woo's last public function for HKTDC before handing the baton across to Jack So. The speech was clearly setting his successor up for continued lobbying on the Phase 3 development of the venue.

Getting the balance on the quality story

One of the best commentators on Asia affairs and particularly US-Asian affairs is UCLA professor Tom Plate. I have given up subscribing to most e-mail newsletter which clutter my mail box and never get read. Plate's Pacific Perspectives columns are a notable exception.

As the China quality issue looms increasingly large, I was interested to catch up on this column from a month ago, long before Mattel's humiliating climb down. As is so often the case, Plate has picked up the complex currents of this story much more accurately than most other - often hysterical - commentators.

Plate's basic points is that there are certainly incompetent and sometimes wicked businesses in China which produce poor stuff. But there are also incompetent brand owners and regulators in the US which, combined with HUGE price pressure from the chain discount retailers, are as much to blame for this mess as the Chinese manufacturers. Arguably, solutions will need to come as much from Bentonville, Arkansas as they will from Beijing.

What has this all got to do with B2B media? The biggest publishers (online and in print) and trade fair organisers in the region are serving the consumer merchandise sourcing business. The pendulum has swung far to far towards Asia for American companies to have any hope of bringing manufacturing back into the US. But, the uncertainties and cheap political point scoring we're currently witnessing will surely hold back some companies for a while and we may see a small slow down this autumn in that sourcing-related business.

We shall see.

Cybermedia into legal publishing

Thank goodness for news alerts services. I am not a regular reader of the newkerala.com web site. So, I might have missed this intriguing snippet about Cybermedia's tie-up with LexisNexis of which I wasn't aware.

The piece is actually about professional negligence insurance for lawyers. There must be some good jokes to line up around that concept although some of them might, I fear, be in bad taste.

However, it mentions that the the topic was raised by the Chief Justice of India at the launch of LexisNexis' Halsbury's Law Monthly which, it says, is jointly published with our favourite Indian business and technology media company, Cybermedia. The event is 'pre-blogged' here as well.

There is no mention of this on either the LexisNexis India web site or Cybermedia's. This could either mean that the bloggers got it wrong or, possibly more likely, they're a step or two ahead of both companies' PR folk. However, caveat lector.

Kenfair suspended pending acquisition announcement

The details are thin, but Kenfair's shares have been suspended pending an acquisition announcement. This is the Hong Kong stock exchange official notice:

At the request of Kenfair International (Holdings) Limited (the “Company”), trading in the
shares of the Company will be suspended with effect from 9:30 a.m. on 25 September 2007
pending the release of an announcement in relation to a very substantial acquisition which is
price sensitive in nature.
By Order of the Board
Kenfair International (Holdings) Limited
Ip Ki Cheung
Chairman


Needless to say, we wait with bated breath. However, as tomorrow is a public holiday in Hong Kong (Mid-Autumn Festival), we'll have to hold it quite a while.

PE firms look to India to continue the fun

With major private equity deals drying up in the US and Europe in the current much more hostile environment, eyes are turning to Asia. More specifically, they are turning to India. We noted at the beginning of the month that ICICI bank is looking to unload its 63% of the Infomedia business.

The story continues to evolve - relatively slowly it must be said. The Economic Times reports:

Notz Stucki, one of the largest asset managers in Europe, has joined the race for ICICI Venture’s 63% stake in Infomedia (formerly Tata Infomedia). Private equity funds such as General Atlantic, Blackstone and Warburg Pincus have also shown interest to buy out ICICI Venture’s stake in the media firm.

The article suggests that a price of Rs400 crores which, if I've got my lakhs and crores right, is around US$100 million.

Reed Business - which has a joint venture with Infomedia (not with ICICI at the newspaper article reports) - is reportedly interested in this deal too. Given the circling funds, however, they'll probably struggle to match what the financiers are willing to pay if this really heats up.

Supplier assessment is the new B2B currency

No sooner have we posted on the Ali-Credit project in Chengdu, than we are pointed to a Global Sources press release on a similar topic. And, ooh la la, they're working with the French. The release tells us that with "Bureau Veritas, one of the world's largest and most-trusted certification authorities, [Global Sources] have launched the B2B industry's most comprehensive supplier assessment service".

The release continues:

Co-developed by the two companies, the Supplier Capability Assessment Service verifies a range of supplier information including facilities, legal entity status, staffing, export markets, key clients, production capabilities, product capabilities, management systems and accreditations, quality control systems and development and expansion plans.

All information is obtained from in-person visits, face-to-face interviews and third-party verifications.

Whether this has all been thrown into particularly sharp focus by the recent quality issues rocking the Chinese consumer products outsourcing business, I'm not sure. However, I coincidentially stumbled across this on a New Zealand news site over the weekend:

"This is a crisis. The spate of product quality problems is an illustration that China's low-cost strategy has reached an end point," said Craig Pepples, the chief operating officer of Global Sources.

"The only solution now is for China to move upmarket and provide a slightly higher-end quality of product," Pepples said.

He said China, like other Asian Tiger economies before it, needed gradually to abandon its instinct to offer the lowest possible price to attract buyers.

"It's now getting to the point where it's so low that they can't do it without getting into unsafe product and manufacturing practices," Pepples said. "It's a turning point for China."

ITU heading to the City of Angels

This one I've had to keep up my sleeve for a while, but I see that ITU has now confirmed that its Telecom Asia event will return to the programme in 2008 and that Bangkok will be the host. This will be the first time the event has been held since 2004 when it was staged in Pusan.

Some of the technology blogs commenting on this are muddling it with the ITU Telecom World event which took place in Hong Kong last year. That's another thing altogether and will return to Geneva in 2009 on its 3 year cycle.

So, well done to IMPACT in Bangkok and my good friends at TCEB.

As a little Friday aside, if you thought that Thai surnames were difficult to pronounce, try the full, official name of Bangkok: Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Yuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit.

Ali-Credit

A news report has popped up in a couple of places about the launch in Chongqing of a "credit archive" using Alibaba's e-commerce platform. The ChinaTechNews.com story is the first trace I can find of it in English:

According to a representative from Alibaba quoted in local media, the Credit Archive shows the credit records of foreign trade enterprises. By combing the traditional credit certifications and the interaction on the Internet, it dynamically shows the credit situation of each enterprise, making the information more accessible to clients and exposing potentially hazardous companies at the same time.

The trustworthy-ness of potential business partners is clearly an issue on Alibaba's mind and in the minds of its users. We wrote back in May about the credit-rating agency elements of its deal with China Commercial Bank. More recently, we wrote about the woes of naive traders in the US who have forgotten (or maybe never knew) the basics of trading caution. With the demise of Latin in the school curriculum, I fear they don't know the meaning of caveat emptor.

With the traditional ratings agencies under a cloud/almost totally discredited (you choose) by the sub-prime mortgage mess in the US, this may be a tremendous business opportunity for the boys in Hangzhou to carve out another strong niche for themselves in China business.