As I've gotten more involved with various enterprises with China, I'm innudated with requests to information/help with companies etc... So I want to share here the various segments of opportunities that I see are available for those of you who want to be involved in working with China as well.

Due the sheer population size in china the competition in any market is multiples of the volume that we see in the devleoped countries. So many people are constantly looking for their chance for advancement that almost any proven market is immediately flooded with new comers copying the business models etc... There's very little understanding of true business models/planning but never underestimate the ability of someone else to lower costs and copy your success from beginning to end. With a lack of IP protection, it's even more competitive than just sheer volume would lead to in the US. So causes every company to look for an edge that can't easily be copied, and having a foreign/US connection or partnership or customers is exactly that edge. I can't keep track of the amount of businesses who've approached me simply because they knew I was american about any connection I can provide for them in the US. Import /export is one of the obvious ones for the manufacturing industries since that's a major industry in China right now. I've been provided with so many sources of cheaply produced high quality goods of all materials ranging from plastic to bronze to stone to wood that's looking for buyers in the US. Unfortunately, my specialty is with high tech and investments. As much as I'm painfully aware of the opportunity here it's not something I can execute on.

The previous opportunity involves selling products from China outwards, and this next opportunity is the reverse about selling products to China. More accurately what China needs is raw materials. I've been asked to look for sources of raw iron, scrap steel, wood, concrete, almost any type of raw materials on the scales of tons. The buyer would be major State Enterprises that have the charter to pretty much build the infrastructure in China. If you've ever thought about the impact of a population of 1.3 billion on a country's natural resources you know exactly how big this market is if you have the ability to find the sources. There was one calculation that in order to house everyone even in the smallest and most minimal of housing, there's not enough sand in China today to make the concrete needed. Add the infrastructure needs on top of a manufacturing mainstay industry, you can see the raw materials buying is almost bottomless as individual sellers are concerned. So if you can find the selling sources, the buying sources needs to be connections directly with state enterprises. If you don't have those connections or can find them on your own, then let me know and I can hook up with my connections. And yes, this is definitely one of those scenarios that only those with the right connections will succeed.

The other one is in the financing, accounting, IPO area. I'm already engaged in this area personally but these are not projects that I can easily scale. When you work with one company on financing, accounting practices or an IPO on NASDAQ, you're pretty much booked with that company. If you keep track of chinese companies on the NASDAQ you can see a recent rush by major what used to be Chinese state enterprises like China Mobile, Sino Pec on NASDAQ. And how can forget the drama around the Baidu IPO that surprised even the Google IPO. In a country where currency conversion is still severly regulated, IPO on the NASDAQ gives the executive team liquidity in a freely convertible currency. That is a holy grail to any Chinese company and there's a flood of companies who want to attempt but either fail or have no idea about how to proceed. If you have the background in financing, account, IPOs, investment banking this is a very deep market with lucrative earning potentials. I will warn you that you better be prepared for the very real, very large cultural differences you'll encounter along the way. But I guarantee that once you've done the first one and experienced the growing pains, you will become one of those of the rare stature to name your price.

Related to this opportunity is simply training in accounting, financing and business planning practices. For a country transitioning from a state owned economy to market economy, actual profit driven business experience is very rare and very much needed. A lot of the smaller companies does not have the money to hire consultants directly, but would send people to training by the droves. You can do this either by setting up your own training program, model and company or become partners with an accredited university. Advantages to both of course, but you have decide based on your abilities to actually to make one of these options succeed.

恭喜发财

When I was last in China I got sick and was in the hospital for one week. This actually gave me the opportunity to learn more about China's Consumer Market than I ever have, through the universally understood and valued channel for watching commercials on TV. Here's some fun differing trends from the US consumer market that I noted for my amusement and hopefully your use.

• In beauty standards, chinese women are trying to get whiter while the US women try to get darker. This trend absolutely fascinated me as commercial after commercial showed different products that made your skin white. They didn't address skin health, or cleaning, but very straight forwardly just whiter. By comparison the US skin commercials are like a science course. This is one of the largest personal beauty product markets in China. My chinese beauty magazines had advertisements of different skin whitening products back to back and all the US advertising featured the whitest skin people and whitest pictures I've ever seen.
• Dieting is an even bigger industry in China. You may laugh at this if you've never seen a chinese person over size 6, but you have to understand that in China they don't even make cloths for size 8 and 100lbs is a nice good weight to have for a woman. Every single female is dieting in China, but they use the most bizarre methods, by my definition anyways. There's tapeworms in the stomach, pulling out teeth so the face is slimmer, special chinese medicine scrubs specifically prescriptioned for each body area to reduce fat, and even binding stockings makes your leg the thinner shape. The commercials are quite hilarious and disturbing at the same time. There's really no regulations on truth in advertising as can be easily seen from the scores of law suits against advertised diet products. There was one patch that you stuck on the bottom of foot while you walked around that's supposed to suck the fat out through the bottom of your feet. Never thought I'd say this, but please take those infomercials about weight-loss/fitness products and export them straight to China. Anything we have is better than the stuff they're making themselves.
• On the other side of dieting, wellness products are the next biggest market. There's basically two groups of wellness products in China. One, old chinese medicine formulas that have been handed down for thousands of years and two, brand new products from Europe, preferably Paris. I think this is a symptom of the one-child policy. On one hand, your number of old people greatly outnumbers the adults that have to support them. So wellness products for old age is in great demand, cause health care will be cripplingly expensive. On the other hand, all the children are the only's, meaning the only branch on the family tree and the hope for the future for 3 generations of grandparents and parents. That's where all the wellness products for kids and babies come in. With all the competition these kids will have to deal with on sheer population and each family only getting one shot at Harvard/Beijing University/Baidu executive, I'd be curious to see the market potential comparison between the kid wellness products and the old people wellness products.
• China has sucky wine and beer. This one's more from personal experience than anything. There's definitely a gap in the market, for almost any wine and beer. I'm from washington state with our own hundred's of wineries and micro-breweries so I may be a bit biased but I don't think a country can become developed without a more mature national palate for alcoholic beverages. Maybe merlot and IPA is not the answer for China, but somebody needs to help these 1 billion plus people out. They're drinking red wine in a pitcher with ice with sprite or coca cola!! Can we at least get them to margaritas or something? !
• Chinese people are tourists at heart. For those of you who think they only do this at the statue of liberty and the golden gate bridge is in for a surprise. The travel/tourism industry is the most active in that country. Not only because of all the foreign visitors now, but the citizens themselves. Any professional conference/meeting of any kind, involves a sightseeing trip somewhere. And this is not simply comdex at Las Vegas with a free poker chip in your registration envelop. This is trains of airconditioned buses to see the hoover dam, the grand canyon, to take pictures in front New York New York's Statue of Liberty and buying at least 3 souvenirs per person. Why does this happen I have no idea. I only know that when my husband travelled to china for the first time this year and requested to do what the locals did and not see the touristy destinations, we had no idea what to do with him.
• Foot massage parlors are the businessmen retreat. And no, this is not like the "massage parlors" here. It is extremely popular, and huge franchise, and simply rows and rows of people sitting in a chair getting their foot washed and massaged. A COO I know takes every visiting businessman there and the women are there together with the men and it's the best business bonding activity. Don't ask me why, but in my mind it doesn't get much more chinese than this. One chain of foot massage parlors has 10,000 employees in all of China, this doesn't even count the countless non-franchise ones. And I'll just end with mention of one interesting anomoly, blind foot massage. Yeap, the masseuse are blind, and these type of foot massage parlors are very popular with quite numerous. Don't ask me why. I didn't have a chance to go to one.

So that's some fun different consumer market trends for ya. There's always more, but we'll just start with these.

I find that Americans who work in China, even the ones that have been involved in business for more than 10 years, have blinders on how things really work in China. The simple view that "I know how things work" is the exact blinders that keeps you from reaching that point. When you are American, you will always be treated with a different approach, with different information than Chinese. And this differs even for expat chinese vs. the local. Who you are automatically self selects you out of encounter with a great many portion of the business workings. A smart American is one who knows there will always be things that they know nothing of, no matter how long you've worked and no matter how hard you try. I say this because I brought in a 10-year veteran of china business CFO/COO advisor who is an American to advise on the best steps for a company that needed funding. This is a man extremely good at what he does in knowing the best way to operate a company to attract funding, but we're almost at an impasse because the CEO sees separate pathways to take when the advisor doesn't. I can tell you that if the company was a US company, the advisor would be absolutely right. You have to fix your accounting and sales so you can show increasing profit and report it on a monthly/quarterly basis to get solid private equity. Even getting loans or government grants is based on your income and income growth, but this is not the case in China. There are intricacies in dealing with the government that if you were skillful and had the right connections you can be rewarded with funding with almost no cost in stock, or reporting what was done with the money. And getting these central government funding will cause other local government funding, grants and loans to follow where previously weren't available. This is even possible for Chinese VC's. Not the VC's run by expat chinese, but truely Chinese VC's who signs the check after 7 meals of heavy drinking and only follow up if you send him a check or a request for more money. But in speaking with the American advisor, these other paths don't exist. The Chinese VC's he knows operates exactly like the ones in the US, and the government grants and loans require just as much accountability. Before you inhale a breath of shock and terror on how money can be given to a business without accountability for how it's spent, you need to understand that the chinese are simply very flexible and adaptable people who work within an imperfect/unfair system to do what they need to get done. So if you're going over to China, please remember that there will always be things you don't know or even encounter. The chinese always like to present their best face forward, knowing that and allowing for the existence of possibilities that you can't imagine will get you a long way to working with the Chinese.