Posts tagged ‘Shanghai’

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07/08/2012

* DreamWorks Plans Studio in Shanghai

WSJ: “DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. on Tuesday signed plans with Chinese partners to build a $350 million movie studio in Shanghai to capitalize on the success of its Kung Fu Panda film franchise as the studio looks to build up its presence in a fast-growing Chinese movie market.

The studio will be 45% owned by the California animation company, with the remainder held by media-related companies controlled by the Shanghai government. The partners also plan an entertainment zone that could bring the total investment to 20 billion yuan (US$3.14 billion) to be largely funded in China.

The foundation of the project is the animation studio, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg said in an interview. “The talent must exist here in China if only they had the knowledge, training and opportunity,” he said.

The partners said the film “Kung Fu Panda 3″ will be co-produced in Shanghai for a 2015 or 2016 release. The Shanghai studio plans its first film by 2017 and would build toward one to three major films a year, with an aim to build an animation base in China that can produce films for a world-wide market.

The joint venture said on Tuesday that it plans to build a tourism and entertainment complex that it calls the Dream Center with an opening date of 2016 in Shanghai’s Xuhui district. The facility near an abandoned airport will include tourist attractions, restaurants and commercial space, the joint venture said. Mr. Katzenberg said his company will help design that aspect of the business but be a small minority partner in the park, which represents the largest share of the investment plans.

The moves—which were announced in part earlier this year—come as rival Walt Disney Co. also looks to build up its presence in Shanghai. The U.S. entertainment company last year began construction of its own $4.4 billion theme park with Shanghai-government partners that will also include hotels, restaurants and other amenities.

Western entertainment companies are looking for ways to tap the fast-growing Chinese entertainment market. China’s box-office revenue surged 42% in the first half of the year to $1.28 billion as increasingly affluent consumers head to the movies. But the domestic industry is still underdeveloped, with foreign productions dominating the business. Mr. Katzenberg said American movies have represented 70% of the Chinese box office so far this year.”

via DreamWorks Plans Studio in Shanghai – WSJ.com.

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14/07/2012

* China football fans greet Didier Drogba at Shanghai

BBC: “Ivory Coast football star Didier Drogba has arrived to a hero’s welcome in China, to take up a contract to play for Shanghai Shenhua.

Hundreds of fans of the struggling Chinese Super League team greeted the 34-year-old former Chelsea star at Shanghai’s Pudong airport.

Drogba’s reported $300,000 (£193,000) a week salary makes him one of the world’s highest paid footballers.

Drogba is among many foreign stars who have made recent moves to China.

He joins former Chelsea colleague Nicolas Anelka at Shanghai Shenhua.

Soon after his arrival, Drogba insisted he had not come for the money.

He said: “It would have been easier for me to stay in Europe, but I chose China. Money is not the most important [thing]. I am here for a whole new experience.””

via BBC News – China football fans greet Didier Drogba at Shanghai.

First cheap plastic toys, then mid-level products, onto hi-tech gadgets; and now international football?

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15/06/2012

* Deutsche Bank Makes Cross-Border Yuan Payment Under New China Central Bank Scheme

WSJ: “A pilot scheme intended to make it easier for companies to settle trade in the Chinese yuan officially kicked off Friday, with Deutsche Bank AG completing the first cross-border yuan payment transaction under the program.

The new program, launched by the Shanghai branch of the People’s Bank of China on a trial basis, aims to streamline the process for settling cross-border trade in the yuan by exempting qualified companies from submitting original trade documentation to support each payment. Information on the program has recently been circulated among banks in Shanghai, bankers said, though the central bank hasn’t yet made a public announcement on the initiative.

Deutsche Bank, one of the largest providers of liquidity to currency markets, executed the transaction on behalf of the China subsidiary of Huettenes-Albertus, a German manufacturer of foundry chemical products, under which the company paid a foreign supplier in yuan.

“In the past, settling trade in yuan has been both time-consuming and labor intensive,” said Beng-Hong Lee, Deutsche Bank’s head of foreign-exchange trading in China. “This is a big leap forward.”

The new scheme currently is limited to companies and banks operating in Shanghai. It follows the PBOC’s move in March, when the central bank expanded the use of yuan in trade settlement to exporters and importers across the country.

As China pushes ahead with its drive to spread global use of its currency, many analysts expect the yuan to account for a bigger share of international trade settlement. Beijing started to allow cross-border trade to be invoiced and paid for in its currency about three years ago, and since then, yuan-settled trade has grown to about 10% of China’s total trade. Some analysts have predicted that figure to grow to 3.7 trillion yuan ($587 billion) this year, or 15% of China’s total trade.”

via Deutsche Bank Makes Cross-Border Yuan Payment Under New China Central Bank Scheme – WSJ.com.

Another step in freeing the world economy from US $ domination.

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13/06/2012

* Gun Ring Involving U.S. Soldier Is Broken Up, Chinese Officials Say

NY Times: “The Chinese authorities said on Tuesday that they had detained 23 suspects here and had broken up an international gun trafficking ring that conspired with a United States soldier to smuggle firearms into China.

The Ministry of Public Security said that more than 100 guns and gun parts, and about 50,000 bullets, had been seized in the case, which is being jointly investigated with the American authorities. The announcement came weeks after United States officials arrested Staff Sgt. Joseph Debose, 29, a soldier with a Special Forces National Guard unit in North Carolina, on charges of illegal firearms trafficking.

According to the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York, customs officers in Shanghai stumbled upon the smuggling ring in August after discovering a Beretta 9-millimeter semi-automatic handgun and other firearms hidden inside a stereo speaker in a U.P.S. package. After contacting U.P.S. in the United States, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, the authorities traced the package to two Chinese nationals in New York, using shipping documents and surveillance video from a U.P.S. facility in Queens. The two men eventually led the authorities to Sergeant Debose, who was acting as a gun dealer in North Carolina, prosecutors said.”

via Gun Ring Involving U.S. Soldier Is Broken Up, Chinese Officials Say – NYTimes.com.

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26/05/2012

* City girls go manhunting while the bachelors in rest of country despair

The Times, London: “The dance floors are polished to a shine and a 150-metre long “love wall” has been erected down the middle of the venue: everything is set for 48 hours of intensive matchmaking.In a now annual tumult of desire and desperation, more than 20,000 singles will descend on Expo Park in Shanghai today in pursuit of a spouse. A majority will be women: educated, salaried, urbanised and disappointed that city life has yet to yield Mr Right.

The event’s organisers assured The Times that a local steelworks and other Shanghai companies rich in male employees had been “encouraged to dispatch bachelors to the scene”. That urgent call for men is an anomaly in a country where a vast gender imbalance has become endemic and which some demographers believe will create a 50 million-strong surplus of single males by the end of the decade. Chinese families already have an instinctive grasp of the supply and demand crisis that lies ahead for young men. In poorer parts of the country, young men in their 20s are preparing unhappily for a long life unshared.

As well as being held on a greater scale than in the past, today’s event in Shanghai has a fresh innovation: singles will enter free, but parents accompanying them will be charged 50 yuan (£5). The deterrent effect will be minimal. Many thousands of parents are expected to attend, cajoling their offspring towards marriages that modern life is increasingly delaying. Plenty of the parental harassment is an old-fashioned wish for stability and grandchildren. But increasingly, the angst in China is born of raw economic fear. …

China’s male surplus will pose unprecedented challenges to the incoming leadership of the Communist Party. No government anywhere has dealt with an imbalance on this scale. Li Jianmin, the head of the Institute of Population and Development Research at Nankai University, said that the difficulty of men finding wives was an effect of the “big backdrop” of a birth-sex ratio of 118 boys to 100 girls. “The gender imbalance trend started showing in the early 1980s, and now we have just walked over the threshold. In five to ten years, the high-risk period will come,” he said. He added that China’s family planning policy was to a great extent responsible for the imbalance. About 90 per cent of Chinese couples would like a boy and a girl, but when forced to have only one, most opt for a boy.

The problems of male oversupply will be further amplified if, as some now fear, China’s economy sputters. In places of high bachelor concentration, high unemployment, and where all hope of marriage has evaporated, there will probably be crime and unrest, said Andrea Den Boer, a demographer whose Bare Branches book warns of long-term security implications. “It is difficult to be optimistic because while China knows that this problem exists, it does not appear to have any plan,” she said. “There is a strong potential building for future violence and unrest and so far the Chinese authorities have not developed a response to those issues, other than a violent one.””

via City girls go manhunting while the bachelors in rest of country despair | The Times.

A natural if unplanned result of the one-child policy of the CCP.

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03/05/2012

* China’s Bright Food buys Weetabix

Reuters: “China’s Bright Food will take control of breakfast cereal maker Weetabix, beloved by generations of British children, in the biggest foreign acquisition by a Chinese food group.

State-owned Bright Food has agreed to buy a 60 percent stake in a deal which puts a value of 1.2 billion pounds $1.94 billion, including debt, on the private-equity owned company that coined the slogan “Have you had your Weetabix today?”

The Shanghai-based group has been on the acquisition trail, seeking to raise its profile and cater for its rapidly growing home market. Weetabix is its second foreign purchase in a year and its first in Europe after other deals fell through. Eighty-year-old Weetabix is Britain’s second biggest maker of breakfast cereals and cereal bars after Kellogg. Its brands include Alpen muesli and Ready Break as well as Weetabix, which lays claim to being Britain’s No. 1 breakfast cereal for under-5s and is made from wheat grown within 50 miles 80 km of its base in southern England.

“As China’s leading food group, we are pleased to become the controlling shareholder of Weetabix,” Bright Food chairman Wang Zhongnan said in a statement on Thursday. “Weetabix has an excellent product portfolio, including leading British cereal brand Weetabix and other category-leading brands. “Private equity owners Lion Capital and Weetabix management will keep a 40 percent stake. The quintessentially British breakfast cereal group was founded in 1932 by the secretive George family and soon producing its iconic bricks of wheat. It was bought by a private equity firm in 2004.

Bright Food now sees a big opportunity for Weetabix in China, where breakfast is a very important meal and there is a trend towards healthy eating.The group, which makes “White Rabbit” candy, bought majority stakes in Australias Manassen Foods and New Zealands Synlait Milk over the past two years.”

via UPDATE 2-Chinas Bright Food buys Weetabix | Reuters.

Related post: https://chindia-alert.org/2012/02/13/pattern-of-chinese-overseas-investments/

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29/04/2012

* China’s great leap forward – into the supermarket

The Guardian: “Made in China says everything, economically, about the last decade. Sold in China tells you everything about the next.

Recent output figures from China were greeted with concern after the country reported its lowest GDP growth for three years, although, at 8.1%, its magnificent compared to the UK’s double-dip recession. Still, there is much talk among economists about a “hard landing”, a “property bubble” and “bankrupt banks”. But there is one key fact to remember about the economy in China. It’s that the minimum wage is going up 15% a year, every year, for the next five years. Take a billion workers and give them a 100% pay rise. It changes everything.

Within a generation, China is likely to displace the US as the biggest consumer market in the world. At Tianjin Port, the world’s fifth biggest, container ships used to export Chinese goods to the rest of the world but come back empty. Now they return with the finished and semi-finished goods from the rest of the world to satisfy a ravenous consumer appetite.

In Tianjin’s vast factory zone, across the road from a Foxconn plant making the next wave of Apple iPhones, the Master Kong factory makes more pot noodles than anywhere else in the world. The huge automated production lines, with machine tools imported from Japan and Germany, churn out five billion noodle packets a year – enough to reach to the moon and back. All the raw materials come from China, all of the finished product is consumed in China. Its just one of 23 Master Kong plants on the mainland.

Further south in the “groundscraper” and weirdly Hogwarts-esque Shanghai offices of Ping An, China’s second biggest insurer, 12,000 commission-led telesales agents make one million sales calls every day. It is the largest telemarketing operation on the planet, feeding on the explosive growth of domestic car sales. Last year 14.5m cars were sold in China – or 2m more than in the US, previously the world’s biggest auto market. Nine in 10 were to people who had never bought a car before. Ping An now insures 32m private cars, raking in premiums of £2.2bn 22.3bn renminbi a year. Four years ago, that revenue was below £100m.

Just off outer ring road five in Beijing, a mundane average-income district, the Wu Mart hypermarket is perhaps an early indicator of how domestic consumption will grow.

The store bears more resemblance to a Lidl than a Tesco but, unlike the oddly deserted luxury shops in the city centre, it is teeming. It’s instantly apparent that mid-range western brands are phenomenally popular with middle-income Chinese consumers. Shelf after shelf stocks the likes of Colgate toothpaste, Nivea, Quaker Oats and Snickers bars.

Whole aisles are devoted to disposable nappies. China’s one-child policy, rigorously enforced, means that spending on a sole child is proportionately huge. Hong Kong babies use 50% more diapers than those in the west, and mainland China is heading the same way. Want to invest in China? Maybe buy Procter & Gamble (Pampers) or Kimberly-Clark (Huggies) instead.“

via Chinas great leap forward – into the supermarket | Money | The Guardian.

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26/04/2012

* For Apple, China Is Middle Kingdom

WSJ: “Not long ago, Asia Pacific was all but a footnote in the financial statements of technology juggernaut Apple Inc. But no more.

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBase

Apple’s sales in the fast-growing region, fueled largely by China, more than doubled and represented 26% of its $39.2 billion in sales for the first three months of the year. IPhone sales in mainland China increased fivefold from the year-ago period and more than doubled in Japan.

Asia Pacific came within striking distance of becoming Apple’s largest revenue source in the fiscal second quarter. The company took in $10.2 billion in sales for the region for the first three months of the year, compared with $13.2 billion for the Americas, long its biggest source of revenue. Apple breaks out Asia Pacific separately from Japan, where sales nearly doubled to $2.6 billion.

Its a dramatic transformation considering Apple didn’t include Asia Pacific in its geographic breakdown until it reported results for the three months ended December 2009. That’s the quarter when Apple released the iPhone in China, more than two years after the U.S. debut. Apple has also yet to ship its new iPad in mainland China, selling 11.8 million of the tablets globally in the latest quarter.”

via For Apple, China Is Middle Kingdom – WSJ.com.

So China is rapidly becoming not only the producer but also consumer of high-tech electronic consumer products!

Posted in Affluence, China alert, Consumer, Economics, Technology | 1 Comment »

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23/04/2012

* GM to Add 600 China Dealerships

WSJ: “General Motors Co. plans to add 600 dealerships in China this year, about a 20% increase, as the auto maker looks to bolster its presence here amid growing competition and an economic-growth slowdown.Chief Executive Dan Akerson on Monday outlined steps GM is taking to boost sales and market share in China, where it is the largest foreign auto maker.

The addition of 600 dealerships would bring the companys dealer network in China to 3,500 stores, up from 2,900 at the end of 2011.  At that size, Chinas dealers would begin to rival the companys U.S. network of 4,400.

GM is adding new models and factory capacity and expanding a technology center near its China headquarters in Shanghai, which will soon be its second-largest global development center. The largest is in Warren, Mich., near its Detroit headquarters. Like GM, many of the worlds major auto makers are expanding in China, concentrating on a market expected to grow to more than 30 million vehicle sales by the end of the decade from 18.5 million last year.”

via GM to Add 600 China Dealerships – WSJ.com.

If you are looking for a business opportunity in China, go for a tyre franchise. The vast majority of Chinese cars have yet to have their first set of tyres replaced!

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