We’re crazy, not stupid

Alibaba’s Jack Ma has a fascinating snapshot of how global trade is going through a radical period of change

“We’re crazy, not stupid” is how Jack Ma describes his Alibaba team in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, yesterday.

Much has been written about Jack Ma and the spectacular success of Alibaba and the WEF session with Charlie Rose is an opportunity for Ma to flesh out the story and destroy some of the myths.

One of the fascinating anecdotes Ma tells is how US cherry growers are preselling their harvests to Chinese customers through Alibaba and cites various other primary producers doing similar campaigns as how American small businesses can sell into the PRC market.

Ma’s interview is a fascinating snapshot of how global trade is going through a radical period of change, the shifting of China’s economy and where the future lies for many industries.

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Riding China’s business pivot

Lenovo, AliBaba and Hauwei are showing how the Chinese economy is moving up the global production chain.

Three weeks ago Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba triumphantly listed on the US NASDAQ stock market with a valuation of over two hundred billion dollars. It was a strong announcement to the world that Chinese companies have arrived as global competitors.

A week later telecommunications vendor Huawei announced it was buying British internet of things darling Neul for £25 million as part of its proposed £1.3 billion investment the UK technology sector.

Quietly last week Another NASDAQ listed Chinese company, computer manufacturer Lenovo completed its purchase of IBM’s mid market server business.

Lenovo’s deal follows its purchase of IBMs PC division in 2005 that saw the iconic Thinkpad laptops become Lenovo products. Both deals tell us much about where the two companies see their respective futures.

China’s great economic pivot

These three big announcements by Chinese companies show how the economy of the Peoples’ Republic of China is pivoting just as other East Asian countries have over the past fifty years.

Leading the example of the East Asian pivot is Japan who pioneered the model of starting as a cheap manufacturing labor source then steadily ground its way up the global value chain to being the leader in many fields.

That model was copied by Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. It hasn’t worked everywhere as countries like Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines have been caught in the ‘middle income trap’ that has seen their economies not move into the higher brackets.

Racing up the development curve

China’s mission with over a billion mouths to feed and keep politically content is to avoid the middle income trap and move into the higher brackets. With an aging population it has to do this far quicker than its successful neighbours.

While Huawei along with car manufacturer Great Wall and white goods vendor Haier are following that established Japanese model, albeit rapidly accellerated, Lenovo and Alibaba are following radically different paths.

Alibaba has the benefit of catering to a billion strong domestic market that’s leapfrogging the west in technology adoption. This gives the company a firm foundation for its global operations.

With Lenovo, the sweeping up of the US technology sector’s crumbs is a strategy that sees them buy immediate market share and develop a global position that would take it another generation to do so under the Japanese model of organic expansion which companies like Honda, Toyota and Sony pioneered.

The task ahead for the Chinese economy in moving up the economic value chain is immense and not without huge political, business and social risks. However as the economy ages, it’s a journey the country’s business and political leaders have to make.

Recently China watcher Patrick Chovanec spoke on the Chinese pivot and warned that the changes will have major ramifications for the world economy, particularly for the commodity exporters — notably  Brazil, Australia and China — who provided the raw material for the country’s early economic expansion.

Lenovo, Alibaba and Huawei are leading the change in the Chinese economy and how their strategies work will define business in the mid 21st Century.

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Alibaba and the rise of chinese companies

The rise of Alibaba shows Chinese companies are now major global players.

Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba floated on the New York Stock Exchange and immediately rang up a 38% gain that values the company at $238 billion, behind only Microsoft, Apple and Google in tech stock valuations.

One of the major shareholders in Alibaba is Yahoo! who posted a 2.7% drop in value despite picking up a $5 billion windfall from the Chinese companies float.

For Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma, this float and the stock market’s reaction is a vindication of his business and of China’s place in the modern global economy, something we discussed with early Alibaba employee Porter Erisman last year.

Alibaba also shows that Chinese companies are now credible international businesses and companies like Haier, Lenovo and Hauwei need to be taken seriously as competitors and suppliers.

While Jack Ma and Alibaba celebrate, Marissa Mayer and Yahoo!’s management team are going to have to give some careful thought about how to use that extra five billion dollars. Time and investor patience is dwindling away for the once powerful internet giant.

It may be too soon to draw Alibaba’s success and the fall of Yahoo! as being the parallel of the rise of the Chinese economy and the decline of the US, but yesterday does give a strong signal about how the global economy is changing.

Image source: alibabagroup.com

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Alibaba goes to the US

How much will Alibaba be worth on US stock markets?

One of the questions in the online business world for the last year was were would Chinese Internet giant Alibaba decide to list – the US or Hong Kong?

Listing in Hong Kong would have been a coup for the Chinese territory and possibly marked a shift in Asian web properties away from listing in the United States.

As it turned out, Hong Kong’s listing rules were too stringent for Alibaba’s Jack Ma who wanted to retain a controlling stake in the business in a way that isn’t allowed on the HK stock market so the company is going to the US for its IPO.

Jack Ma and Ailbaba’s rise is a fascinating story partly told by Porter Erisman in his Crocodile on Yangtse who was interviewed for Decoding the New Economy last year.

Alibaba’s listing on a US exchange, the announcement isn’t clear if its the NASDAQ or NYSE, will also be a test for the valuation of Asian internet properties in Western stockmarkets.

With revenue of around a billion dollars this year, a Google like P/E of 30 would see the company  valued at around $30billion, although there could be arguments that a Facebook like valuation of 100 times earnings might be more appropriate.

Regardless of how much it is valued, Alibaba is going to be blazing a trail for Asian and, specifically, Chinese companies over the next few years.

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Globalisation with Chinese Characteristics

What are the challenges facing Chinese businesses as they expand globally?

“eBay is a shark in ocean, Alibaba is a crocodile in the Yangtze” film maker Porter Erisman quotes the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, in comparing the two online trading sites.

In promoting his film Crocodile in the Yangtze, Porter spoke to Decoding the New Economy about the rise of the global Chinese internet giant.

A key part in Alibaba’s success is taking on eBay on it’s own turf, “if you’re David fighting Goliath you can’t play by the big guy’s rules,” Porter says.

This is exactly what the Chinese company did when eBay entered their market and today Alibaba and it’s subsidiary Taobao have sales exceeding eBay’s and Amazon’s.

“Back in about 2003 Jack Ma came to me and told me about a secret project to overtake eBay,” Porter says. “When we looked at them they looked like a Goliath, they’d never really been beaten in a market they’d entered first and they had a huge war chest with a $150 million committed to the China market.”

It turned out that eBay weren’t as powerful as they appeared, something other entrepreneurs have discovered when giants like Google have entered their markets.

The Chinese Leapfrog

Like many rapidly developing countries, China is leapfrogging various stages of development that Western economies went through with the retail industry and e-commerce being two examples.

“Some people say cellphones will leapfrog landlines, actually the same is due with entire systems,” says Porter. “In China coming from so many years of a command economy there wasn’t a very developed retail culture or even a consumer culture.”

“Taobao came along at a time when all of that was still in the early phases of development and the company basically leapfrogged that whole phase of building out shopfronts and building logistics.”

“E-commerce in China is revolutionary while in the US, or Australia, it is evolutionary.” Porter says.

Porter quotes Jack Ma as saying “e-commerce in the US would be a dessert, in China it is the main course.”

China’s Global Challenge

As companies like Lenovo computers, Hauwei telecommunications or Haier whitegoods have discovered, Chinese businesses face challenges when expanding overseas. Porter sees this as a matter of time and scale.

“Like Japan in the 1970s and 80s there’s a whole wave of companies that have started going global. China’s such a big market that there’s a lot of companies that get big and develop scale before going international.”

“I’d say the biggest challenge in the beginning is cultural,” states Porter. “China’s at a disadvantage because information and the media are so controlled that’s sometimes a rude awaking when a company goes global like a Hauwei and then faces a bunch of political issues it doesn’t understand.”

“One of the reasons I made the film,” Porter says. “I wanted entrepreneurs in China to see it and understand these are the issues Alibaba faced when they went global and hopefully you can learn from some of those successes and mistakes.”

Going to China

Porter’s advice to westerners going into China is to shut up, listen and learn, “don’t assume that just because things are done a certain way in the US or Australia that it’s superior.” The country’s culture and ways of doing business are different to those of North America, Europe or Australia.

“If you look at the way traffic moves in Shanghai it looks crazy. If you drove like that in Sydney it would be a disaster but there’s just different ways of through traffic, getting point A to B.”

“It’s better not to judge, but just step back.”

Regardless of our judgements, China’s move up the value chain means we will see more PRC founded companies going global.

Over the next decade we’re going to see the globalised economy start to take on some recognisably Chinese characteristics.

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