Product development centers aren’t extremely expensive as investments, but they carry a much higher level of prestige for developing countries due to their status as cutting-edge centers for innovation. Against that backdrop, major new R&D moves by global corporate giants Adobe Systems (Nasdaq: ADBE) and Visa (NYSE: V) certainly don’t look too good for China. In the former case, software giant Adobe has announced it will shutter its China R&D facility, resulting in the loss of hundreds of jobs. In the latter, financial services giant Visa has also snubbed China by announcing a major new global technology development strategy that includes a new center in neighboring India but not in China. Read Full Post…
Two news bits involving employee movements are casting a spotlight on major stories that have rippled through the Chinese corporate headlines over these last few months. The first has employees of leading PC maker Lenovo (HKEx: 992) moving into the Chinese corporate headquarters of faded cellphone giant Motorola, indicating the former is confident of closing its landmark purchase of the latter. The second has US-owned meat processor Husi laying off most of the workers at its Shanghai plant, which is reeling from a massive downturn after investigative TV reporters uncovered food safety violations at the facility. Read Full Post…
The largest in a string of Chinese antitrust investigations this year has begun nearing closure, with word that Beijing regulators are crafting new rules that will require greater transparency from luxury car makers regarding their pricing policies. The new rules would follow a series of massive fines against both luxury automakers and their parts suppliers, who were penalized for charging excessively high prices for after-sales replacement parts and maintenance services. Read Full Post…
One of the highest profile cases in a recent series of probes against multinationals in China has reached an emphatic but reasonably just conclusion, with word that Beijing has fined British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline (London: GSK) nearly half a billion dollars and handed several of its top local executives suspended jail sentences. I was never a big fan of this investigation, which saw GSK pursued for bribing doctors and other medical professionals to buy its drugs. That’s not because I think GSK was innocent in this case, but rather because I think the company was unfairly singled out for punishment for corrupt practices that are widespread in China’s business culture. Read Full Post…
With Alibaba’s blockbuster IPO nearly in the past, attention will turn over the next few weeks to tech giant Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and the mystery surrounding the lack of a launch schedule for its new iPhone 6 in China. While Alibaba is a story of hype, the iPhone 6 saga is quickly becoming a tale of intrigue, as everyone tries to guess what’s happening behind the scenes to delay this other highly anticipated event. China’s own media are helping to fuel the suspense, with a new report from the Xinhua central news agency providing clues about what looks like a tangle with China’s censors. Read Full Post…
Conspiracy talk was buzzing through the microblogging realm this past week, as numerous executives weighed in on 2 major news events in the China tech world. One of those saw Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) finally unveil its new iPhone 6, only to mysteriously yank China from its global launch map without any explanation. The other saw executives speculating on the significance of and reasons behind the surprise defection of Zhang Yaqin, a longtime China-based Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) executive who abruptly left the company for a job at leading Internet search company Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU). Read Full Post…
The volume continues to grow in a war of words between China and the west over a series of antitrust probes against multinationals, including the latest reports that Beijing is targeting Japanese car giant Toyota (Tokyo: 7203) with yet another such investigation. Toyota’s Lexus division is just the latest company to fall under Beijing’s microscope for its pricing policies, following similar investigations into most of the world’s top luxury car makers. Leading US smartphone chip maker Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOMO) is also being investigated, and so is leading global software maker Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT). Read Full Post…
Now that Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) unveiling of its new iPhone 6 is finally in the past, we can finally sit back and take a look at the specifics of the company’s launch plan for China. The only problem is that there isn’t any such plan yet, even though China is now one of Apple’s largest global markets. Instead, there seems to be lots of confusion about when the newest iPhone will officially go on sale on the Chinese mainland.
I can partly sympathize with Apple, as I’m nearly certain the latest confusion is the result of Chinese bureaucracy that’s impossible to control. But at the same time, this kind of sloppy move will only further undermine Apple’s reputation, which is already under regular attack by central Chinese media that are constantly looking for new ways to find fault with this trendy but secretive company. Read Full Post…
Two new strikes, one in Shanghai and another in Guangdong, are shining a spotlight once more on the constant challenge of labor unrest in China, following a similar wave of such strikes earlier this year. One of the latest strikes saw thousands of workers go off the job at Wintek (Taipei: 2384), a Taiwanese maker of touch screens and a supplier to gadget giant Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL). The other saw employees walk off the job at a warehouse owned by recently listed e-commerce JD.com (Nasdaq: JD) in Shanghai. Read Full Post…
This week’s tech round-up from the microblogging realm is a flurry of interesting but unrelated news bits, as the world gets back to work following the end of the summer holidays. Leading the list is the latest effort by Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) to find a backdoor into China, which comes in the form of a new Weibo account that isn’t verified but has at least one tech executive spreading the word and encouraging people to follow the page.
Meantime, online search leader Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) generated some microblogging buzz when it unveiled an unusual pair of high-tech chopsticks in Beijing. Last but not least there’s Xue Manzi, a tech investor also known as Charles Xue, who was busy hyping a tech start-up on his microblog. Xue is a man I came to dislike over the years for his largely empty talk, even as he built up a base of more than 10 million followers on Weibo (Nasdaq: WB). But then he got sent to prison for becoming too influential and political, making me more sympathetic, before his release in April and quick return to vacuous blogging. Read Full Post…
A new report on the resignation of the head of Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) huge Asia R&D labs to take a job at homegrown Internet giant Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) is shining a spotlight on the growing challenges that multinationals may soon face in retaining some of their top Chinese employees. Just a decade ago, jobs at foreign companies were highly coveted by ambitious Chinese in the high-tech sector, mostly because China didn’t have any of its own big names in the space.
But the emergence of companies like Baidu, Tencent (HKEx: 700) and Lenovo (HKEx: 992) have created a whole new set of opportunities for these workers. What’s more, improving working conditions at Chinese-owned firms, combined with Beijing’s subtle anti-foreign bias against high-tech multinationals, could ultimately lead many of China’s brightest tech workers to abandon their jobs at the multinationals for domestic names. Read Full Post…
