Full Contents - August 2007


COVER STORY [Premium content]

Introduction

  • The main event

  • Beijing 2008 is crunch time for Chinese brands looking to make good

Lenovo

  • Rise of the machines

  • Lenovo sees the Olympics as a means of boosting its international profile

  • Home help: China marketing

  • While Lenovo has yet to win over consumers in the US and Europe, it reigns supreme in China. However, most analysts agree that, given its 36% market share, the company’s domestic Olympic marketing efforts offer little room for growth. So why is the company spending big in China?

Li Ning

  • Window to the world

  • Sportswear maker Li Ning’s Olympic marketing strategy is precision-planned and very ambitious

  • Size matters: Going global

  • The largest shoe Li Ning has ever made was for US basketball star Shaquille O’Neal.

Marketing

  • Star power: Signing up sports people

  • The Olympic spirit may be all about fair play and but the Olympics business is about getting bang for the buck. Only a handful of Chinese athletes have achieved enough recognition to attract top endorsement deals.

Olympics crash

  • Macro matters: The post-2008 crash?

  • It’s August 25, 2008, a day after the Beijing Olympics have ended. The Shanghai Composite Index has closed at 2,657, the same level as it was at the beginning of 2007. Olympics-mania is dissipating, investors are pulling out as quickly as they piled in, and the markets are collapsing.

Public relations

  • Spin it to win it

  • Beijing bureaucrats are handling the games’ delicate publicity matters well, for now

Technology

  • A technological triumph?

  • Beijing’s “high-tech Olympics” will give local tech firms a boost in revenue and publicity

SPECIAL REPORT [Premium content]

  • Card counting

  • Credit card use is on the rise, and banks are struggling to manage them

China Merchants Bank

  • CMB strategy: Never a state prop

  • The fundamental difference between China Merchants Bank (CMB) and its domestic competitors is that it was never intended as a cash point for local government projects.

Retail banking

  • Leader of the pack

  • China Merchants Bank has blazed a trail in retail services. Now every other bank is trying to do the same

PERSPECTIVE [Premium content]

Ken DeWoskin

Philip Bowring

  • Seeds of progress

  • If Taiwan’s presidential election goes smoothly in 2008, a settlement with Beijing will become a remote possibility

View from Europe

Duncan Freeman

  • New leaders, new divisions

  • Fresh faces in Paris and London are likely to stir up debate in Europe. China will, as always, be a talking point

Web Worm

REPORTS [Premium content]

Commodities

  • Golden opportunity

  • A movement into the gold market is seen as a means of diversifying China’s US dollar holdings

Desertification

  • Ecological imbalance

  • Desert areas in Northern China are gaining ground. The only solution may be to eliminate farmland

Energy

  • Sand solutions

  • Could Canada’s Alberta oil sands provide an answer to China’s growing energy demands?

Environment

Media

  • Magic money

  • Pirates make books appear out of nowhere and are reaping substantial rewards

NGOs

COMMENTARY

NGOs

  • Top-down control

  • The closure of a respected civil issues publication may mean trouble for NGOs

Private equity

  • Squeezing the deal

  • China hasn’t always been friendly territory for private equity (PE) investors. Most notably, an attempt last year by the Carlyle Group to take over construction equipment maker Xugong was put under severe public and regulatory scrutiny. Just in the last month, it was revealed that a Carlyle bid to buy into Chongqing City Commercial Bank was also vetoed.

REVIEW

China Buzz

Fat Dragon

News Review

Environment

Law

  • Paper mandates

  • News laws, including the labor contract law, were passed by a recent meeting of the legislature

Macroeconomics

Securities

Politics & Society

Product safety

  • Tit for tat

  • What began three months ago with the largest recall of pet food in US history had transformed into a diplomatic incident by mid-July as safety concerns over Chinese products threatened to undermine the country’s credibility as an exporter.

Punditry

QUESTION & ANSWER [Premium content]

Consulting

  • Setting the standard

  • Accounting firms must position themselves to cater for a more financially integrated world, says Deloitte’s new regional boss

SPOTLIGHT

Netherlands

  • Plugging the gap

  • Sino-Dutch trade ties strengthen with technological sharing on the environment

Q&A

  • Open for business

  • With foreign banks now able to offer more services in China, ABN AMRO is looking to capitalize

CULTURE

Book Review

Miss Chopsticks by Xinran

  • Migratory lifestyles

  • Hundreds of millions of Chinese have fought their way out of poverty in the last few decades.

Travels to the West

  • Gorging

  • Graham Earnshaw walks from Shanghai to Tibet when he has the time, always starting from the last place he stopped. This month we find him near the Three Gorges Dam, Hubei province

MARKETS

Industry Overview

Telecom

  • The generation game

  • China’s telecom industry is preparing for the launch of 3G networks, but the wait has been a long one

Podium

  • The fourth way

  • The recently drafted Foreign Investment Partnership Law presents overseas players with another path into China

Red Dragon Fund

FOCUS

Guest Word

Report

  • Room at the inn

  • Hotels are increasing capacity for the Olympics and also looking beyond 2008

  • Betting on gold

  • The Olympic Games may translate to gaming dollars for Hong Kong and Macau

  • Olympian effort

  • Pulling out all the stops for Beijing 2008

  • Up and away

  • Beijing 2008 and a changing aviation industry

Q&A

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