Managing The Dragon

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. In Part I, I responded to Tsinghua’s first set of questions, and [...]

China’s capital markets are at an inflection point, and foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) are seeing more opportunities to raise capital to fund their China operations than ever before. In terms of its capital markets, China finds itself in the same situation that the United States did at the beginning of the 1980s. During the 1970s, the [...]

No, I’m not talking about the meal of steamed dumplings and buns, rice noodle rolls, steamed vegetables, egg tarts and other Chinese delicacies that is so popular in Hong Kong. I’m talking about the $31 billion of RMB-denominated “dim sum” bonds that may be issued in Hong Kong this year. What’s a dim sum bond? [...]

Shanghai plans to be an international finance center by 2020, and creating a board on the Shanghai Stock Exchange where foreign companies can list their shares is seen as an essential component. Preparations for the board have been taking place over the past two years, and Shanghai’s Deputy Mayor, Tu Guangshao, who is responsible for [...]

It seems that nearly every company I speak to in China lately plans to go public in the next year or so. Most are not the Internet or social media companies that are the darlings of stock market investors everywhere. Instead, they are companies with sales as little as RMB 300 million ($46 million) that, [...]

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. Part I provided my answers to the first set of questions posed [...]

In recent posts, MTD has discussed the idea of locating factories in China’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities as a way of dealing with rising costs in the country. There’s no question that wages, rents and just about every other cost incurred when building a factory are highest in Tier 1 cities like Beijing [...]

Several people have commented on Moving Back to America, a recent article in The Economist. The gist of the article is summed up in the first paragraph: When clients are considering opening another manufacturing plant in China, I’ve started to urge them to consider alternative locations,” says Hal Sirkin of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). [...]

When inflation hit 21.7 percent in 1994, Zhu Rongji, China’s then economic czar, literally shut down lending by assigning tough credit quotas to the regional banks. Zhu told bank officials that they would lose their jobs if they exceeded his credit quotas. As a result of Zhu’s tough administrative measures, inflation in China slowed to [...]

I became an entrepreneur later in life than most, but I must have had the seeds of entrepreneurialism within me for some time. Once given encouragement, my entrepreneurial instincts took complete control. I didn’t start my first company until I was in my 40s, but once I went down that road, I never looked back. [...]