Category Archives: Research
Tourism in China
Commercial tourism in China as an industry is still in its infancy. It is an industry, though, that has much potential and is being actively developed by Chinese national, provincial and local governments. There is much worth seeing for both domestic and international tourists. China has a diverse landscape, with a long coastline, deserts and [...]
Lijiang Old Town
Yesterday we arrived in Lijiang. From my twitters, you’ll see that it is a very scenic place, like Kunming, sitting on a mountain plateau. Unlike Kunming, the mountains are visible all around. The main part of the commercial city proper seems quite small, having, even, a dusty country town feel to it. Very low rise, [...]
Product Differentiation and the Chinese SME
On Tuesday and colleague and I visited a local Chinese manufacturer, an OEM of domestic appliances. We had a longish discussion about price competition and the struggle to improve margins through product differentiation. Firms in Zhejiang compete on price in highly competitive commodity markets. Price competition limits profits. No financial capital is accumulated to invest [...]
Work email
I’ve been struggling with work email these last two weeks. There seems some general fault in the link between China and the UK university network which makes access difficult if not impossible sometimes. In addition, my fancy Nokia has died so, even if the network was up, I don’t really have a suitable device with [...]
Brief thoughts on Japan