Skip to main content

China blocks Google (again)

I found this story remarkable. The Chinese authorities seem to be taking a more and more hardline approach to international businesses and markets, which flies in the face of the "common knowledge" that exposure to free market capitalism will inevitably soften the regime's economic and political control on the economy.

Many of my clients are seeing toughening up of import restrictions, increasing requirements for technology transfer and great efforts being made to replicate or substitute technologies in the ICT space. TD-SCDMA is a great example of the latter, which has been pursued despite its obvious flaws, principally because its use avoids patent payments to foreign enterprises.

I'm increasingly of the believe that technology companies should regard China as less of a market opportunity and more of a threat. I can't believe I've just written that, but I hear too many stories such as the above regarding market shaping and asymettric competition to ignore them. Interesting times.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Impacts of a handset leasing model on mobile telcos

Following yesterday's post, here's some related thinking on the impacts on operators of handset leasing. Handset sales represent around 25% of operator revenues in a typical European market, but generate only around 5% of margin. It may therefore be the case that the scenario described would lead operators to a more profitable structural model than exists today. Oil companies are consistently and acceptably profitable, despite being (literally in some cases) the ‘dumb pipe’ that operators are so desperate to avoid becoming. One of the reasons for the oil majors sustained profitability is clear focus on their role in the value chain – to supply the fuel that enables transportation, relying primarily on location, then brand and finally product innovation to compete. BP or Shell do not need to subsidise the purchase of a car in order to drive consumption of fuel because consumers are ‘hooked’ on it (it gets them from place to place) and there are many credible car manufacturers an...

Differences between Industrial and Digital businesses

Since I'm stuck on a Eurostar crawling through western France I thought I'd use the downtime to share this table I've made on the differences between Industrial and Digital companies across the main business functions. A strange insight into how my mind works... but hopeful a useful summary!

What I've been reading this week

I think that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye. This week: Nintendo, RIM under siege, cyber crimes cost Huawei, Amazon gains ground online and in India and why we should be more like Han Solo. New business models A brilliant blog on the continuing travails of Nintendo. Wii took them on a different path to Microsoft and Sony, but have only temporarily halted long term inability to compete in hardware. http://www.asymco.com/2012/03/26/staying-satiated-and-smart/ And as if things weren’t bad enough, Sony’s next generation PS3, codenamed “Orbis” is rumoured to be coming next year. http://kotaku.com/5896996/the-next-playstation-is-called-orbis-sources-say-here-are-the-details Housing prices in tech hotspots are rising fast. We see the same thing in the trendier areas of London, where tech companies are landing , buying office...