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.

It is always my interest to follow through the email management concept and theory and this slide has given a very good and solid view on email management.

Many of the time we have over-manage our email account, emails and even email relationship. Just imagine, in traditionally, we have one address, and one mailbox. We communicate through postal mail and we manage only 1 mailbox address. In internet living, we sometime too greedy to manage up to 5 or 6 different mailboxes, and we are so desperately manage it by categorize it into different usage and assign specific time, day to go and pickup mails from different mailboxes. Funny huh?

Well, just a sharing and hope you not falling into email over-manage and get back to working track and performing effectively during this recession period. Do less email, more works.


“It will be very hard for China to achieve economic growth of 8% in 2009,” said Premier Wen Jiabao in Davos, Switzerland. Due to the global recession, China’s GDP grew by 9.0% in 2008, with the last quarter’s growth rate dropping to 6.8%, the lowest rate in past 7 years. After the global recession hit China, thousands of plants shut down, and most of the workers lost their jobs and had no choice but to return home. According to the data from the central government, by the end of 2008, 20 million migrant workers had lost their jobs. More job losses are expected in 2009, because more companies will enter difficult times due to the worsening global economic environment.

In the past, many factories and exporters rely on Alibaba to find their potential buyers, and Alibaba is proud to have this article ‘The Day when Alibaba does not exist in China’, reflecting how much the exporters rely on Alibaba in their trading businesses. However, it is worth to take a look in today China economy and ask, ‘the Day of Alibaba when the exporters one after another is shutting down’.

All these while, Alibaba has positioned itself as ‘unique positioning of B2B’ where they claimed themselves as the first and only ‘Made in China’ company that excel in B2B era, and has a great vision to help millions of China SME/SMI to go global. Indeed, Alibaba really has helped many of the China companies to transform the ‘Made in China’ goods to oversea market, and creating millions of potential global opportunities. However, when come to global recession or rather the great depression situation, will Alibaba’s magic still working? Thousands of its customers have claimed for shutdown due to ‘overstocked’ and ‘overproduced’ but can’t find the new marketplace to sell their products to. It will be worth while for the senior exec of Alibaba to take a look back, where personally I don’t see any additional value that this company can bring to China SME/SMI.

The market need a new business model for B2B, same goes to B2C or C2C. If we deep dive into the root of this economic recession, it is not easy to find that major of China’s products are shipped to United States, and thanks to the big brother who have always enjoying high GDP growth and spending behavior like they hate their money so much and can’t wait to throw it away in exchange of some fake identity, high ‘brand’, not necessary products. They are fortunate to have a mastermind guru name Steven Covey who teach them to grade ‘effective time management’ but forget to teach them ‘effective money management’; and to rank their spending as ‘urgent and important’, ‘urgent but not important’, ‘not-urgent but important’ and ‘not urgent and not important’, and obviously all their spending to boost GDP all these while are majority falled under ‘urgent and important’ to those Chinese Exporters. And obviously too, when these American start to realise their ‘urgent and important’ spending generator can no longer crunching out new credit line from their credit card, they start to move the spending in this category into ‘non-important and non-urgent’ and start to squeeze their pocket. They have then upgrade their ‘urgent and important’ spending to limit to ‘spending to find new job’, ‘spending to survive’, and of-course, ‘spending for Beer’.

Anyway, back to China here, once the American start to tide up their belt and pocket, they are stuck. No one else (or rather countries) like Amercian who can absorb almost everything China produce. Even Dubai, Middle East, Europe or Ausie are now badly damage by Amercian’s financial crisis and start to downgrade their spending pattern.

So what’s next? When 90% of China SME/SMI start to suffer from this spending depression, the China GDP will fall, and most of the exporters will face greatest joy in their live, to spend hard with their existing credit line they enjoy, and prepare to go bankrupt in next 3 – 6 months. 50% of the SME/SMI that growth up during great economy boom in Year 1999 to date and solely rely on exporting their products to oversea will sieze to be another new chapter for China Great Business History book. What will be the future of Alibaba when this happen, where its majority income are from SME/SMI? It will depend on the 40 robbers to decide.

I have been absent from here since during the CNY, reason being that things are moving faster than I have expected. No feeling about economy downturn, and no fear of what economic downturn will bring to our nation, my surrounding, or my family, or more precisely, myself, my career, or my future. I have also stoped submitting to Preseed starting from Batch 15, after Batch 14 ‘bail-out’

If you ask, am I give up on fighting for my career, or my future, or to take good step to ensure I’m well protected or immue from this round of crisis, No I’m not giving up. Am I giving up on Pre-seed? No. I’m not giving up too! It just that in this early CNY, I have new plan in my mind. I will talk about this later on my CNY Plan, but first to talk about MSC Preseed program.

I enter Pre-seed solely to train up my presentation skill, pitching skill, writing proposal and so on. Since last year Aug, I have been going through 6 months of these kind of pitching session in Preseed, mainly to get the feel or rejection, and feel of been ignored by the people you are talking to. It is interesting and I think my lesson has come to a stage where it need a semester break. I need to go out and do the real ‘stress test’ on public, and get a feel of what I have make a different on myself from past 6 months and now. I am really fortunate that the first 3 rounds, I have a chance to talk to some real industry experts who are more ‘professional-being’. Now the entire business model is taking-off, and ready to fly high. It is been interesting to see the hardword on the ‘training’ never went wrong  

As for what I have done during CNY, 2 book title on Alibaba.com founder success story, Jack Ma; 1 book on Taobao.com success story to K.O. E-Bay China; 1 book on BaiDu success story; my interesting holiday daily routine. A lot of mind sparking, and it make my mind getting clearer on how to space the idea of B2B2C2C. More interesting thing comes back later when my Boss talked about Long Tail, and how to blend the idea to shape the future digital marketplace. A model we have been working for very long-long time ago, and finally get shaped out in good look. We put up this idea with all our efforts in last two weeks, and start to work on this. It become very interesting that the idea is widely acepted by public when we go and pitch the idea to some investor.

For the next coming two weeks, we already have our initial plan on hand, 6 different presentation deck targeted different market segment, and we are ready to go. What’s cool, the key word Long Tail, Blue Ocean Strategy, will soon return to become a big buzz word again in Malaysia, and other 13 countries in Asia.

Looking forward to share more soon. P/S, I will be slowing down in Preseed application, but do email me if you need information from me. You can also email me to request for my past-proposal and slides as reference purpose (anyway the idea is total reject at this moment and I don’t intent to repackage it to sell in future). I just get the idea in for training up my pitching…

Cheers!