Asia is where the action is

HSBC to Refocus on Asian Markets - NYTimes.com: Good piece here in the New York Times about HSBC's decision to move its CEO from London back to where he should be: in Hong Kong. He's not the only one: I gather that Fidelity International's Investment President Anthony Bolton is heading this way too along with Goldman Sachs head of global capital markets, Dominique Jooris.

What's this all got to do with business media? Well, two things possibly:

1. Asia is where the action is. It's been that way for a while, but this is very clearly the story of the next 2 - 3 years at least. The BBC recently reported the OECD's improved global outlook with the headline "World economies rebound but China set for best growth". And Hong Kong looks poised to take big advantage of that: property markets are booming here, back to almost record levels, and the mood is far more upbeat than either Europe or N. America.

2. The financial media based here should reap dividends from these moves: companies like Haymarket with its Finance Asia title, Euromoney plc with AsiaMoney and the various specialist titles of Incisive can only benefit from the moves which are being announced. Interesting that Incisive has just launched its new Professional Advisor title in Hong Kong with the now compulsory Twitter feed up and running on day one. I suppose all those bankers are going to need some good advice on how to work their own money harder.

Virtual World Expo

An interesting post here at Ogilvy's Asia Digital Map blog which feeds my current fascination with the evolution of virtual events and social media: Asia Digital Map » Blog Archive » Take a virtual tour of World Expo 2010 Shanghai

There is a real buzz beginning to build about the World Expo which is very interesting: the tired old cynics in other parts of the world who dismiss these things as something old-fashioned and not for the digital native generation may be in for something of a surprise. The numbers are staggering and the organisers seem well on the way to hitting their targests: they're already 30% over their ambitious sponsorship targets which is pretty impressive in this tough crisis year.

Hu Shuli's Exit from Caijing...interesting commentary

This is an interesting commentary on the muddle at Caijing magazine, the crusading financial magazine closely associated with its editor Hu Shuli. Hu, in a much rumoured move, recently parted company with owner SEEC Media's chairman Wang Boming along with a sizeable portion of the magazine's staff.

Hu Shuli's Exit from Caijing: Mostly over Money-ChinaStakes.com

The commentary linked here at ChinaStakes.com suggests that it was a good old-fashioned media power struggle rather than a life and death fight over press freedom as it has been portrayed in much western media commentary.

Ogilvy On: Twitter for Business

This SlideShare Presentation includes the slides used in yesterday's very interesting webinar run by Ogilvy's Thomas Crampton and his colleague Brian Giesen. I was one of the minority who voted that Twitter was of most interest for creating buzz around events but that is clearly of particular interest for our industry.

Ogilvy On: Twitter for Business

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Virtual Meetings Will Be Replaced by Live Meetings? | The Power of LIVE

There's been a lot of talk of late of real meetings being replaced by virtual events. Some organisers appear to have taken this route as a last resort to keep ailing events at least on some sort of life support. Folio with its magazine show and Hanley Wood's Big Builder Conference are just two examples I've noticed recently. The smart money, however, still appears to be on the combination of intelligent online strategies that make the best of the strengths of the face-to-face and virtual worlds.

That was what UFI's outgoing President John Shaw was saying to Vincent Everts at the Zagreb Congress last week and that's basically what this interesting piece suggests too: Virtual Meetings Will Be Replaced by Live Meetings? | The Power of LIVE

Executive Webinar: Twitter for Business in Asia

Executive Webinar: Twitter for Business in Asia
Well done to Amcham Hong Kong for linking up with the indefatigable Thomas Crampton at Ogilvy and the Wall Street Journal for this webinar on social media. Shh. Don't tell him, but I'm planning to capture TC's digital black belt.

Keep the dates for UFI Asia Seminar 2010

Trade fair industry in Asia expanded in 2008

According to the 5th edition of popular annual Trade Fairs in Asia report, jointly produced by BSG and UFI, the exhibitions industry in the region expanded by 8.7% in 2008 despite the weakening global economic environment.

For full press release, see our corporate blog, or the BSG web site where you can also find information on ordering the report.

The strategy is to be on as many of the e-readers as possible

Two interesting points from this clip:

1. Lighthouse Media's Marketing is a really interesting and aggressive competitor in the marketing B2B media space in Asia. It's giving Haymarket's venerable Media a good run for its money these days and interesting to see them experimenting with video as another channel. I wonder how they'll make money from it, though? Google isn't very generous with sharing its YouTube gains.

2. The FT's approach to e-readers, as explained here by Greg Zorthian, global circulation director for the Financial Times is very catholic. They're spreading they're bets across the whole e-reader world and who can blame them. Nobody at this stage really knows where the technology will settle although they can be fairly confident that it's not likely to paper in the long term.

"Healthy and stable"

How many B2B media CEOs have been able to use that phrase this year in describing their companies' finances? Not many. And, in fact, the CEO who said that, didn't use exactly those words. He said "gesund und stabil" and the company in question is Deutsche Fachverlag from Frankfurt. The CEO, Klaus Kottmeier.

Thanks to Hugo E. Martin for his summary of their results. Brush up German, guys to read Hugo's post or the DFV press release. For those who can't manage it, highlights are:

Overall sales: up 2% at €135.7mn
Events sales: up 20.4% at €5.9 mn
Online sales: up 20% at €5.4 mn
Over-seas revenues: up 10% at €27.8 mn

Print, of course, took a bit of a pasting and was was down 8.6% at €91mn. Mind you, most magazine CEOs would look very kindly on a publisher who brought a single digit decline in advertising revenues to a review meeting.

This was the first year that DFV is including results from its investment in Indian publisher Images Multimedia Group.