Creative Idea Powerhouse

Mary Meeker, an analyst from Morgan Stanley, been revaling the Tech Trends since early 2008, has recently revealed the latest Tech Trend - 20 Mar during end of last month. Nothing realy suprises the market - Recession, crisis, Online Ads market shrinking and so on.

One pretty encouraging factor from this trend, is that Online Retail is equal penetration with 'EMAIL', both have 70% of the penetration rate. Beside, at the very ending of the slide there is a very strong words for e-Commerce - BIG DEAL!!


However, the one key problem for the Tech Trend, that direct related to Asia Retail exporters, is the slowdown of retail industry in US and Europe. Asia exclude Japan, are majority exports oriented. These big giants MNC are highly rely on the consumer market in US & Europe to consume their products. For the past 20 years, US consumers been consuming junk goods from everywhere of the world, and producing tons and tons of ‘deleted items’ in their ‘un-recyclable bin’. Today, these groups of consumers ‘hold back’ on their crazy spending behavior, and the entire supply chain immediately halted.

While many middle-men ‘distributors’ buying ‘cheap’ goods from Asia and ‘resell’ in ‘high-value’ to US and Europe, today I bet that there are many of these middle-men have filed for Chapter 11. Many of them have more than enough inventories on hand but no moving market. The exporters, on the other hand, are too halted with over productions in their warehouse (it is a good news for those who implement JIT – Just in Time production model) and very bad news for those who always anti-US mfg theories.

Many of the SME/SMIs in Asia, especially in China, are rely on Alibaba to be the center-link for them to export. Today, the alarm hit directly to Alibaba and all its customers. Will Alibaba survive this round of winter? With the burden of its hundreds thousands of SME/SMIs relying on this platform to seek for new contract. How will Aliaba react, and will its ‘internal consumption and internal marketplace’ will be the ultimate solution to its millions of consumers? Only Alibaba know…

eBay has been the leader in C2C since its early startup day. The company slowly drive its direction to close to Amazon’s B2C and then to Alibaba’s B2B model, and soon we may see a complete new e-Business model that combine the B2B, B2C and C2C, the term I used to call as B2B2C2C.

eBay also the provider for the e-Logistic, where they try to launch the logistic service with UPS, but in totally different model with Amazon one stop distribution model. In the result, it prove to be more effeciency and effective be it in good time or difficult time, especially when recently Amazon just shutted down some of its disti warehouse and slashing workforces. Every year, Amazon spent at least 8 – 10% of their total revenue in maintaining the ‘efficient’ supply chain, which it is a challenging move when market turn bad. eBay strategy to provide end to end distribution will be the new model for SCM in e-Commerce industry that will be widely accepted by public and the darlings from the Street of Wall. Another focus for eBay in future will be the mobile marketplace, and I think iPhone will be one of the major platform that eBay will ride on to unleash its new market potential.

However, during last week trip to Hong Kong, I have the previlege chance to meet up with one of the pioneer in China Internet Market Analyst. He shared with me his personal opinion on the future trend and direction of China Internet marketplace and potential opportunities underminded still in China. One, as we are exploring, is the recently adopted 3G market in China, and another, will be the virtual mapping industry in China.

No matter what, we understand that China is a challenging yet fruitful market that we can’t neglect, and we must enter this market carefully. We will make sure our new office will soon landed in China, in Year 2009.