What can China learn from Singapore on sustainability? - China Weekly Hangout

Richard Brubaker

Sustainable development expert and CEIBS adjunct professor +Richard Brubaker has spent six weeks in Singapore and was impressed by the progress the city-state has made in developing sustainable practices. On Thursday the +China Weekly Hangout will ask him what lessons China can learn from Singapore. At this Google+ pages your will find reports about some projects he visited (including a great video on vertical farming)

Join us in our weekly China discussion on Thursday 10 October at 10pm Beijing times, 4pm CEST (Europe) and 10am EST (US/Canada). You can register at our event page.
You can leave you questions in the comments or ask them live during the hangout at our event page.
China Weekly Hangout

Last week the +China Weekly Hangout discussed the Shanghai Free Trade Zone. +Steve Barru, +李洛傑 and +Fons Tuinstra  wrapped one week of news on Shanghai's Free Trade Zone, and end in a not-so positive mood about what this new zone is actually going to do.



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Foreign entrepreneurs: avoid China - Marc van der Chijs

Marc van der Chijs

Marc van der Chijs might be a serial entrepreneur in Shanghai, the co-founder of the successful video hosting firm Tudou, but China is nowadays not offering the climate a start-up company needs, he tells in SGentrepreneurs.com. “If I set up a business today, it won’t be in China,” he says. SGentrepreneurs:

Firmly entrenched in the Avoid China camp is Marc van der Chijs, who, ironically enough, is the founder of Tudou, the second most popular video sharing site in China. It was recently bought over by Youku. 

“There are less opportunities in China these days; the environment is not so positive anymore,” he says at the sidelines of DEMO Asia in Singapore, “I’ve been there for 12 years, had a great time. I still love the country. But doing business as a foreigner has become more difficult.” 

He reached this conclusion after starting a new business called unitedstyles, a site that allow users to design, share and buy their own fashion. 

They needed to hire a lot of foreign designers, but it was getting hard to woo these people and bring them into China. 

“Getting a visa was impossible,” he says. There’s a maximum number of visas a startup can apply for, as the government wants more local talent to be hired. 

But getting competent local staff who know social media and can speak excellent English is hard. Marc couldn’t find them. 

Another challenge was finding Venture Capitalists with a global outlook. If you’re an entrepreneur based in China who wants to serve a global market, securing funding might be a challenge. 

“When I talk to Chinese VCs, they want to focus on the Chinese market. That’s the only market they know” he says. 

But while the golden age for foreign entrepreneurs in China has long past, Marc believes that businesses focusing solely on China still have a decent shot at success. Given how large the market is, startups don’t have to look outwards to succeed. 

For now, Marc has decided to relocate part of unitedstyles elsewhere. He cites Singapore as a possible location. 

“If I set up a business today, it won’t be in China,” he says.

More in SGentrepreneurs.com Marc van der Chijs is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Singapore sets up naval design firm in China - Wendell Minnick

Singapore Technologies (ST) Engineering's marine arm, ST Marine, has incorporated a wholly owned subsidiary, ST Marine (Wuhan) Engineering Design Consultancy, in Hubei Province, China, writes defense analyst Wendell Minnick in Defense News.

Wendell Minnick:

The new subsidiary will strengthen ST Marine's engineering team in Singapore and "leverage the latter's well-established naval design capability and engineering expertise," the release stated. 

ST Marine's in-house Engineering Design Center has designed a variety of commercial and defense vessels, including the Diving Support Vessel, Seismic Survey Vessel and Anchor Handling Tug Supply Vessel.

More in Defense News.

Wendell Minnick is a speaker at the China Speakers bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch. You can also send in a request using our speakers' request form.

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Why Yahoo cannot ignore China - Paul Denlinger

Paul Denlinger by Fantake via Flickr

China's leading eCommerce site Alibaba.com is in another spat with its largest shareholder Yahoo (neatly summarized here in the Wall Street Journal) because it started to recruit advertisers on the mainland. Business analyst Paul Denlinger explains in the Business Insider why Yahoo has to reclaim lost ground in China.

Things were fine as long as the two companies didn't enter each other's territory: For Alibaba, this was the China market and for Yahoo , this was everywhere else. (Yahoo has a significant presence in Hong Kong, and commands more than 95% of all traffic in Taiwan through Yahoo 's acquisition of Kimo in 2000, and Yahoo founder Jerry Yang's Taiwan roots.)

Alibaba is entering the global market, taking on Yahoo outside China. So, Yahoo entering China, led by its current headquarters in Singapore, is unavoidable, writes Paul Denlinger.

That's a mighty big hole. With China's economic dynamo, it's impossible to sell a real ad package if China is not included. This is why Yahoo needs to move into ad sales in China. 

But the problem, from the Chinese government's perspective, is that the ad sales center is based in Singapore, which is not a part of China. When Google skedaddled out of Beijing to Hong Kong in March, it could at least claim that Hong Kong was a part of China, and that it had not in fact left China, even though Hong Kong is not covered by the Great Firewall of China which censors content in the PRC.

But that is not the case with Singapore, which China recognizes as a sovereign nation, even though more than 70% of its population are ethnic Chinese. And diplomatically, China and Singapore, along with the other countries of Southeast Asia, have been going through some rough patches lately.

In short:: Yahoo is not only taking on Alibaba, but also the Chinese government, warns Paul Denlinger.
More at the Business Insider.

Commercial
Paul Denlinger is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.

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