Managing The Dragon

After respectable — but low for China — growth of 7.7 percent in 2012, car sales surged by 21.6 percent during the first quarter of 2013. Even more surprising was the fact that sales of Chinese brands increased even faster than the overall market. Sales by the local car companies increased by 33.6 percent during [...]

Sometimes, too much success in China can create its own set of challenges. Ironically, the very success that Apple Inc. (NasdaqGS: AAPL) has had selling its products to Chinese consumers may be at least part of the reason why the Cupertino, California company found itself at odds with the powers that be in China in [...]

Hope springs eternal — and nowhere is it gushing more strongly than with electric vehicle enthusiasts all over the world. In the United States, investors in Tesla Motors, Inc. (NasdaqGS:TSLA), the U.S. maker of electric sports cars, seem to be shrugging off the fact that the company is losing a $100 million a quarter, the [...]

On Wednesday in Beijing, the Information Office of the State Council, China’s cabinet, published the country’s first white paper, on China’s rare earth industry. Some of the information in the report caused a stir in the U.S. equity markets. Shares of Molycorp, Inc. (NYSE: MCP), owner of the Mountain Pass rare earth mine in California, [...]

Innovation and the protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) go hand in hand, and are two topics that come up frequently in discussions about China. Tsinghua University is doing a study on the status of both in China and asked for my comments. Following are my answers to Tsinghua’s first set of questions. Part II [...]

Have you pimped up your avatar lately? If you haven’t, you may be missing out. In its report on social media marketing in China, OgilvyOne Worldwide found that 93 percent of users in China listed “pimp up my avatar” as one of their favorite activities when on social networks. According to the survey, pimping one’s [...]

There is no more attractive market for a company that provides goods and services to the power sector than China’s electricity industry. It is big, fast-growing and open to new ways of powering the Chinese economy. Moreover, the Chinese companies that are building out China’s power generation and transmission industry are well positioned to do [...]

As the dawn of the new century, a new technology promised to fundamentally change global economics. Government leaders in the United States and China, the two largest economies in the world, believed that companies from their respective countries should lead in the development of this new technology. By 2010, two national champions, one from each [...]

In April, the American Chamber of Commerce in China, which represents 1,200 U.S. companies, issued a report saying that China is increasingly using discriminatory rules to reduce access to previously open areas of its economy and to promote its own technology industries. The report highlighted complaints about efforts to nurture China’s computer and other technology [...]

With fuel prices higher than ever, energy policy has become one of the key issues in the U.S. presidential campaign. Although it has taken a backseat lately to the economy as the country struggles to deal with the meltdown on Wall Street, everyone realizes that new solutions — and alternatives to the current sources of [...]