'Amazon Coat' Hits Jackpot in U.S.

Arielle Noa Charnas/Instagram

It never entered Chiu's mind that his Orolay puffer jacket became a huge hit, celebrated as "Amazon Coat" in the U.S. And held up as a budding rival to premium brand Canada Goose.

Using duck down sourced from China’s Hebei and Anhui provinces, the polyester coats are priced between $80 and $139. By contrast, Canada Goose jackets start from about $575 in the United States. 


He estimates his firm made $5 million in sales last month and expects to bring in $30-$40 million this year. U.S. sales - almost all of which are sold through Amazon.com Inc - account for 70 percent of total revenue.

Orolay’s success is, however, not just a tale of competitive pricing and a design that found favor with U.S. consumers. Read More at Yahoo! and People.
 

"The Wandering Earth" Hit Chinese Movie Theater

Last year, Chinese cinemas took in Rmb5.8 billion ($913 million) in ticket sales during the first seven days of the Chinese New Year holiday – the most ever in a single week.

Comedies are traditionally the biggest crowd-pleasers during the holiday, but sci-fi could secure a greater share of ticket sales this time round. That’s because this Chinese New Year week sees two sci-fi blockbusters hitting the big screen. Admittedly, one is a sci-fi comedy – filmmaker Ning Hao’s Crazy Aliens, starring actor Huang Bo. The other is The Wandering Earth, which many in the foreign press have hailed as the first proper sci-fi film made in China.
Both movies are adapted from stories by Liu Cixin, the first author from Asia to win best novel at the Hugo sci-fi and fantasy literary awards.

Information Times felt the need to clarify the claims of a ’first’, however. “The Wandering Earth is definitely not the first sci-fi movie China has ever made, but it is the first sci-fi film that’s garnered so much attention in China.”

Read more >>

Happy Chinese New Year!

Hi friends! It's been a long time not update my tea house. Many things happened and have tried something new. And felt lost somewhere...And one day when I walked around our local bookstore and grabbed a book and turned to one page, on which there is a quote from Virginia Woolf, saying: “If you are losing your leisure, look out! -- It may be you are losing your soul.” That reminds me to come back and continue my journey,my passion about writing and sharing...Here I am, hello 😀! Happy Chinese New Year! Wish you have a peaceful, meaningful, and healthy 2019! Cheers!

Exhibition on China and Fashion Attract 0.7 Millions

“中国：镜花水月"Damon Winter/The New York Times

A dress by Guo Pei at the “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibit.

The talk of Wall Street over the last week may have been Shanghai’s plunging stock market, but many blocks farther uptown, where commuter traffic gives way to verdant sidewalks, a different set of numbers related to China was making news. As it entered its final week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring Costume Institute show, “China: Through the Looking Glass,” was attaining blockbuster status.

As of last Friday morning, 735,000 people had attended the show, with a week to go before its close on Sept. 7, including a final Friday and Saturday with viewing hours extended until midnight. That has already made it the most-visited Costume Institute show in the museum’s history, displacing “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” which pulled in 661,509 attendees, as well as elevating it to No. 7 — and climbing — on the museum’s top-10 most popular list, on a par with other 700,000-plus-visitor shows such as the “Mona Lisa” (1963), “Origins of Impressionism” (1995) and “Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” (2010).

Andrew Bolton, curator at the Costume Institute and the man behind the show, said there have been more positive responses left in the visitor’s comment box than ever before. (“Usually people use it as an opportunity to vent displeasure,” he said. “Often at the lighting, or the signage.”)

By any objective measure, this will be the most successful fashion show the Met has ever had. The question is: Why?

“Honestly, it totally surprised me,” Mr. Bolton said. “I was prepared for it to be polarizing. We were predicting around 500,000 visitors. I never expected this level of response. ”

“No one expected it would surpass McQueen,” said Maxwell K. Hearn, the Douglas Dillon chairman of the department of Asian art, and Mr. Bolton’s collaborator on the exhibition, which is in the Asian art galleries on the second floor, some Egyptian galleries on the first floor and the Anna Wintour Costume Center on ground level.

A visitor photographs a Dior dress by John Galliano at the Met exhibition.
/Damon Winter/The New York Times

A visitor photographs a Dior dress by John Galliano at the Met exhibition.

I didn’t expect it, either. Not because I didn’t like the show (it’s visually engrossing in its mix of luxury, whimsy and point) but because it doesn’t have the single iconic hook that can transform a purportedly high culture meditation into an extended pop culture moment.

After all, it isn’t, as Mr. Bolton said, immediately obvious from the name what the show is about. (Answer: the way a received fantasy version of China engages the imaginations of Western designers.) And the subject itself was ripe for criticism from those who thought the approach played to a now-discredited stereotype of the East. You can’t attribute it to the sheer size of the exhibition, the largest ever, or it’s length, because size does not equate to allure.

There wasn’t the sort of human gossip element that helped drive interest in the McQueen show, held a year after the designer’s suicide and days after Kate Middleton married Prince William in a dress by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen.

There was, to be fair, lots of striking use of mixed media, which made it seem both very contemporary as well as historic. And it included film — Wong Kar-wai, who wrote and directed “In the Mood for Love,” was the exhibit’s art director, and clips from movies like “The Last Emperor” and “The World of Suzie Wong” abound — always a popular medium.

But Mr. Wong is an independent director as opposed to a household name, and when Baz Luhrmann, a much more recognizable Hollywood figure, was the creative consultant on an earlier Costume Institute show, 2012’s “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” it wasn’t nearly the same hot ticket.

When I first saw the show in May, I was struck by the facile nature of the fashion when juxtaposed against the antiquities. No matter the clothes’ beauty — I remember the runway impact of Tom Ford’s pagoda collection for Yves Saint Laurent and being amazed by the broken blue and white china shards of porcelain on an Alexander McQueen bodice — they pale when compared with the source of the inspiration, in part because the latter has a creative integrity the former only borrows. Often too literally. Please go to The New York Times read more about this story.

At Pearl River, Four Decades of Helping New Arrivals From Asia

Every morning, Ming Yi Chen walks down to the basement of Pearl River Mart, the Chinese department store he opened in 1971, and burns incense. Then he walks back to the first floor to light more incense. He breathes in the sandalwood, to him a calming scent. And the day can begin.

With the news this week that Pearl River Mart, at 477 Broadway in SoHo, would close in December because of a significant rent increase and an unsustainable business model, it became clear that Mr. Chen’s routine — and those of his 40 employees — would soon disappear into the capitalist cloud.

“There are people waiting for this space,” Mr. Chen, 76, said from the tea balcony, overlooking a floor that stretches from Broadway to Mercer Street, 30,000 square feet in all. “Maybe H & M, one of those big chains — with big pockets.”

It is fair to say that those big-pocketed stores do not offer the soundtrack of traditional Chinese music and tweeting birds, nor do they display lanterns, gongs and 60-foot-long paper dragons amid waterfalls. From the soy sauce and Chinese underwear that were lifelines for homesick Chinese immigrants to the slippers and qipao dresses that became staples for New York fashionistas, Pearl River Mart tells a lesser-known tale that is more than the sum of its dry goods.

Run with a strong, nurturing hand by Mr. Chen’s wife, Ching Yeh Chen, 68, Pearl River has provided a life for its immigrant workers for four decades. It has been a welcome alternative to restaurant and supermarket jobs for new immigrants, a place where Cantonese and Mandarin were spoken and employee banquets were held every year. The store, overseen by a board of trustees and 30 shareholders, has helped some workers apply for green cards, once had a matching 401(k) plan and still offers health insurance.

“We are probably one of the few pioneer companies that does that in Chinatown — I’m proud to say that,” Mrs. Chen, the president, said of the insurance plan. “Most of Chinatown, everything is in cash. In that sense, we are pretty fair, and people will stay here long enough.” (The store has been in four locations, including Canal Street.)

Often, two generations have worked side by side, and some employees have turned a job stocking shelves into a lifelong career.

“I’ve been with the Chens since I immigrated to the United States, as a part-time worker,” Wilkie Wong, 50, said. He had just arrived from Burma in 1982 and was attending Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side. Mrs. Chen knew a school counselor and asked her for part-time employees. Mr. Wong showed up with two of his classmates; now he is the company’s vice president.

Asked about the store’s closing, Mr. Wong said, “I have mixed feelings.” He just got an office with a window two years ago, he explained. A graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo with a degree in economics and international trade, he had been doing the accounting in a separate basement office on Wooster Street.

But the future concerns him. Mrs. Chen said she would like to move to smaller quarters, downsize the inventory and, to better compete with Amazon, boost the online business, which Mr. Wong directs. “If we continue, he’s still with us,” she said.

But Mr. Wong’s 16-year-old son will not be joining him. “As an immigrant to the United States, it’s the same as my parents and every parent who wants their kids to have a high education, be a lawyer, doctor,” Mr. Wong said. “Even though I enjoy working here, I want him to have better than what I had.”

For some longtime employees, it might be time to move on. Lapyan Ng, 63, from Hong Kong, has worked at Pearl River for over 20 years. “Maybe I need to retire and take care of my granddaughter,”   >>

Not Loving It

Salon magazine asked this month whether McDonald’s has developed a “self-hating complex” in China. The reason for its question was the local translation of its slogan – “I’m lovin’ it”.

The Chinese version is Wo jiu xihuan which, as Salon points out, can have pretty negative connotations because the second character in the phrase is used to contradict something emphatically. “The natural implication is that the speaker is responding to someone who has just insulted McDonald’s food,” writes Salon. “While there is no perfect translation for the phrase, it has the same essential spirit as ‘I like it no matter what you say!’”

Hence you might use the phrase in a defensive retort when someone asks: “Why do you eat that garbage?” Salon went to the experts to confirm its analysis and Professor Liu Lening, head of Columbia University’s Chinese language programme, said the publication’s interpretation was correct. He advised that a better translation of ‘I’m lovin’ it’ would have been Wo hen xihua and also suggested Wo hao xihuan, which means “I really like it”.

Chocoholics? Ferrero to Open First Chocolate Plant in China

The first record of chocolate in China is from the court of the Kangxi Emperor in 1706. A papal legate by the name of Charles-Thomas Maillard De Tournon brought some with him in order to charm the Chinese monarch. Unfortunately the cocoa-based product, which at that time was served as a drink, failed to impress. One account of the imperial tasting holds that Kangxi took a sip and declared he would much rather have a cup of longjing tea (a specialty from Hangzhou in Zhejiang province).

Three hundred years later and there are still many Chinese who would agree with Kangxi. The sweet, creamy taste  and texture of chocolate – now mainly consumed in solid form – is too rich for many Chinese who grew up with little or no dairy in their lives.

But that is changing rapidly. The Chinese confectionary market is growing between 10% to 20% annually, depending on who you ask, and the big players are all jostling for sales.

Cue another Italian from Piedmont – Giovanni Ferrero, the head of the family-run business that produces Nutella and the gold-wrapped Ferrero Rocher balls. He sees Asia as the main source of his candy company’s growth in the coming years and this summer he will open a Rmb5 billion ($800 million) factory in Zhejiang, reports China Business Journal.

In 2013 the notoriously private CEO told the Wall Street Journal that “the strength of the Rocher brand [in Asia] is an early indicator of the route to follow”.

Four companies currently dominate the Chinese chocolate market – Mars, Nestle, Ferrero and local brand Le Conté. Mars, which has the biggest market share, has two factories in China, producing Snickers and Dove bars, and M&Ms. Mars also makes a locally available rice-infused chocolate called Cui Xiang Mi.

Hershey’s, the world’s fifth largest chocolate maker, has also launched a major offensive: buying Shanghai candy maker Golden Monkey last year and opening a research centre in the city in 2013.

The feeling is that urbanisation, rising wealth and an increasing interest in non-Chinese foods will keep the market growing. Annual Chinese chocolate consumption is currently only 200 grams a year per person. If the average Chinese were to consume even a quarter of the 11kg of chocolate the British munch annually, it would result in more than $20 billion in additional sales for the confectionary industry.

Last month Hershey’s predicted the Chinese market as a whole would be worth $3.4 billion by 2019, up from $2.7 billion today (the global chocolate market will next year grow to $98 billion according to research by the consultancy Markets and Markets).

Ferrero, which had revenues of $8.7 billion last year, is the only one of the major players not to have some kind of Chinese facility.

This, however, is very characteristic of the privately-held company which began life as a pastry shop in Alba. In the years following the Second World War, Giovanni’s grandfather Pietro began mixing cocoa with ground up hazelnut. The result was a solid, chocolatey block. His son Michele – who died last month at the age of 89 –  then came up with the idea of mixing it with vegetable oil to make it spreadable. As Nutella sales surged, an empire was born.

Michele insisted on growing the company naturally and resisted making any acquisitions bar one – a small hazelnut company in Turkey. His son Giovanni, who has been running the company since 1997 shares his father’s business philosophies.

“We’re not interested in maximising revenue in the short term, like everyone else. If we were listed, we would be under short-term pressure to deliver dividends and profits,” the WSJ quoted him as saying in 2013. Indeed, while other multinationals have moved production away from China recently, Ferrero’s long-term mindset has led him to make a major investment instead.

In the short term it may hurt its margins in China. That’s because some Chinese have been heard to moan about the price of imported Ferrero Rocher chocolates. As the Beijing Commercial Daily pointed out, after Ferrero opens its 30,000 tonne a year plant it will be harder for the company to justify the price tag for the locally-made versions. “Ferrero’s price has always been higher than other brands, but Chinese customers won’t accept this once the company reduces their transportation cost.” >>

Disney’s Cinderella Tale Woos China’s Grown-up Audience

Charles Perrault’s folk tale about Cinderella was written around the seventeenth century. But a Chinese legend bearing a striking resemblance to its plot seems to have appeared in the Tang Dynasty, almost a millennium earlier.

It is the story of a very bright girl named Ye Xian. Not only is she beautiful she also has a very kind heart. But her father dies so she is forced to live with her stepmother. One day when drawing water Ye catches a fish with red fins and golden eyes. She takes the fish home and places it in the pond, taking every scrap of food she can find to feed the fish.
Unfortunately her stepmother snatches and kills (then eats) the fish while Ye is out running errands.

When Ye discovers her fish is gone she becomes terribly upset. A little old man (the fairy god father?) magically appears and instructs her to retrieve the fish bones, put them in a bowl in her room and it will grant any wish she wants.

One day, during the annual festival for young maidens to meet potential husbands, her stepmother and stepsister set off for the dating fair. Ye wants to go too and prays to her fish bones. Suddenly Ye finds herself clad in the most beautiful green silk robe with jade and other fine jewellery adorning her. More importantly, she is also given a pair of gold embroidered slippers.

In her new outfit, Ye rushes to join the celebrations. She is so beautiful that men and women – including her stepmother and stepsister – start wondering who she is. Worried that her identity could be compromised, Ye runs back home but leaves one of her slippers. The Emperor later finds the slipper and becomes determined to find its owner… (Presumably, you can predict the ending.)
That helps explain why many Chinese are familiar with the Cinderella story – even if they didn’t grow up watching the famed Disney cartoon. And last week, Disney’s live-action film Cinderella became the biggest box office winner, taking in over Rmb200 million ($32 million) during its opening weekend. >>

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon

The secrets behind China’s extraordinary educational system – good, bad, and ugly Chinese students’ consistently stunning performance on the international PISA exams— where they outscore students of all other nations in math, reading, and science—have positioned China as a world education leader. American educators and pundits have declared this a “Sputnik Moment,” saying that we must learn from China’s education system in order to maintain our status as an education leader and global superpower.

Indeed, many of the reforms taking hold in United States schools, such as a greater emphasis on standardized testing and the increasing importance of core subjects like reading and math, echo the Chinese system. We’re following in China’s footsteps—but is this the direction we should take?

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? by award-winning writer Yong Zhao offers an entertaining, provocative insider’s account of the Chinese school system, revealing the secrets that make it both “the best and worst” in the world. Born and raised in China’s Sichuan province and a teacher in China for many years, Zhao has a unique perspective on Chinese culture and education. He explains in vivid detail how China turns out the world’s highest-achieving students in reading, math, and science—yet by all accounts Chinese educators, parents, and political leaders hate the system and long to send their kids to western schools. Filled with fascinating stories and compelling data, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? offers a nuanced and sobering tour of education in China.

• Learn how China is able to turn out the world’s highest achieving students in math, science, and reading

•  Discover why, despite these amazing test scores, Chinese parents, teachers, and political leaders are desperate to leave behind their educational system

• Discover how current reforms in the U.S. parallel the classic Chinese system, and how this could help (or hurt) our students’ prospects

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World  by Yong Zhao
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (September 15, 2014)

Who's Winning China's Chocolate War?

M&M as Terracotta Warrior Credit: FITCH

At the new M&M's World chocolate megastore in Shanghai, the decor is a tribute to Chinese culture. There's a Great Wall of Chocolate and a massive M&M statue wearing the armor of a Terracotta Warrior. Chen JieTing, 20, posed for photos with an M&M wearing Bruce Lee's yellow jumpsuit. "I love M&Ms -- not too sweet and so cute," she said.

Chinese consumers traditionally prefer salty snacks, but the world's chocolate makers have been making converts -- and competing fiercely for market share -- in the high-stakes market that's home to 1.37 billion people. The local chocolate market has been growing 12% annually, according to Euromonitor International. China's embrace of chocolate has helped push up cocoa prices and contributed to fears of an international shortage. (Mars Inc., the maker of M&Ms. has warned the industry will need 1 million more metric tons by 2020 and is working on sustainable farming to boost yield.)


Meanwhile, Western brands have upped the ante in China by building factories and innovation centers, launching flashy campaigns, buying local chocolate makers and creating retail experiences like the M&M's store, which opened in August.

Mars, which also makes Snickers, has come out ahead, with a projected 39% of the Chinese market in 2014, according to Euromonitor. Its biggest hit is the Dove brand, which accounts for a whopping 34% of national chocolate consumption.

After the era of Chairman Mao Zedong, "when China's doors opened in 1979, you really had a billion people who had never tasted chocolate," said Lawrence Allen, a former Hershey and Nestlé executive in China. "It was a virgin market."

Companies rushed in and learned by trial and error -- Mars tried first with M&Ms. he said, but Dove was what took off. Hersheys had a hit with bite-size Kisses while others were selling 60- or even 80-gram bars, because "Chinese people do not sit down and eat 60 grams of chocolate at a time," said Mr. Allen, author of "Chocolate Fortunes: The Battle for the Hearts, Minds, and Wallets of China's Consumers."

There were cultural differences too. China traditionally classifies foods as "heating" and "cooling," concepts not about temperature but about the effect on the body. Chocolate is a heating food, so it's ill-advised for summer.

Read more at Adage.

The People’s Republic of Chemicals

The name of China is almost obscured by a grey smudge on the title page of The People’s Republic of Chemicals, and this image proves to be apt.  This book examines the crisis caused by toxic smogs that periodically choke vast regions of China and the massive particulate clouds that drift far beyond the country’s borders.

Authors William J. Kelly and Chip Jacobs joined forces once before in order to write their climate classic, Smogtown: the Lung Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, a remarkable 2008 exposé and memoir about air quality, politics and health in Southern California’s smog belt. This time, the duo of self-described “smog gumshoes from Los Angeles” go farther afield to investigate air pollution that threatens to put a chokehold on the Pacific Rim. What’s more, Mandarin editions of both books will be available through the Central Party School Publishing House.

No doubt the translators were challenged to render some of the exaggerated gonzo phrases and slang from this “murky yarn of atmospheric pain and karma” into prose that doesn’t come across as glib or simply baffling.

“Ashtray-skied towns” abound and burning coal “cruds its troposphere like cigar smoke in a closet.”  Beijing is described as “the city where your oxygen sometimes came spiced with black char.” A chapter entitled “Tweets for the Wheezy” notes that “a Twitter account had economic superpowers throwing each other the stink eye.” It goes on to describe how the U.S. Embassy in Beijing inadvertently raised a ruckus in 2009 and 2010 by posting hourly readings of particulate pollution as measured on the roof of their former compound. Intended as a service for American travellers and embassy staff, the air quality statistics appeared on @BeijingAir, an embassy-run Twitter page, and showed that the capital’s atmosphere frequently was less healthy than the official daily averages posted by China’s Environmental Protection Bureau would indicate. Chinese officials took umbrage and tried to block the public’s access to these damning numbers.  It’s obvious that Kelly and Jacobs are relentless researchers, and they don’t hide a heavy reliance on secondary sources. They readily confide: “We Googled until our fingers tingled. Then we gasped.”
...
U.S. President Bill Clinton also emerges as an eco-villain. Although Clinton championed environmentalism in the United States, Kelly and Jacobs note how the bilateral trade deals made during his administration got the American consumers hooked on inexpensive Chinese goods. Prices were kept abnormally low because of China’s cheap but dirty energy sources and sweatshop wages paid to labourers. But exporting dirty manufacturing to China could not outsource pollution indefinitely, particularly when antiquated or wasteful methods were used there without modern filters. Regrettably, no provisions prevented China from financing highly contaminating coal-based projects.

“In post-W.T.O. China, something biologically creepy was only a factory pipe away,” the authors observe. They conclude that ultimately, the world cannot escape the consequences of carbon gluttony on its climate. Kelly and Jacobs urge President Xi Jinping “to make eco-restoration as much his legacy as ridding the party of the endemic graft he so loathes.”

Read more at ChinaFile.

Chinese Smartphone Brands Push Into U.S.

A host of Chinese smartphones have big ambitions for the U.S. -- but don't expect a flood of marketing from them.

Just a few weeks ago, research firm IDC declared that Xiaomi, a four-year-old Beijing company, had stormed to third in the worldwide smartphone market based on units shipped. Only a day later, it was leapfrogged when Lenovo completed its Motorola acquisition. These companies now aim to replicate industry leader Samsung's rise, parlaying success at home to go global.

Realizing this goal, however, could be an expensive marketing proposition for brands that are obscure outside of China. U.S. carriers are reluctant to carry the political risk (and marketing weight) of selling Chinese devices. That puts the onus on the smartphone brands themselves.

"Chinese brands don't do a great job of brand building," said Ben Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies. "The cost to invest and build a brand in the U.S. seems a bit too daunting for them."

Daunting but tempting. Western markets still hold the industry's best margins -- and its prestige. "To be a truly global brand, you have to be in the U.S.," said Lawrence Lundy, a Frost & Sullivan analyst. He expects that some Chinese brands will follow Samsung's strategy of investing broadly in media; others will attempt to sell devices without spending big, like Apple. Here's what to expect from the top five. >>

A Map of Betrayal, An Ambivalent Double Agent, Torn Between Two Countries

When the Chinese writer Ha Jin came to the U.S. in 1985, he was only planning to stay long enough to finish his graduate degree. After that, he thought, he'd return home and teach English.

But a series of events shocked him into staying permanently, starting with the capture and trial of a Chinese spy named Larry Chin. Chin spent decades infiltrating the CIA, but swore at his trial that he was trying to improve the relations between the two countries.

Larry Chin "claimed that he was basically serving both countries. He used the metaphor 'mother and father' ... really, he was torn by the two countries," Ha Jin tells NPR's Arun Rath.

In 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. Ha Jin soon decided to settle permanently in America.

In the decades years since, his novels and stories have won him international acclaim and a National Book Award.

His newest novel, A Map Of Betrayal, describes the life of a spy who is deeply ambivalent about spying on America, a country he loves as much as China. There are unmistakable echoes of Larry Chin — and, Ha Jin tells Rath, of the novelist's own experiences.

Please read/listen the interview highlights with Hajin at NPR.

Catching the Eye of the Chinese Shopper

Photo by Darcy Holdorf

For consumer brands in China, a major battleground is the country's growing hypermarket segment. And the frontline troops are armed with mini-dresses and microphones.

Visit any Chinese Walmart, Carrefour or Tesco on a weekend, and there will be more than 100 promoters in the store dispensing samples and sales pitches. Their role reflects the shopping habits of middle-class Chinese, who are notoriously fickle toward brands.

"Chinese consumers know the brand name through media, but when they go to the store, they want to feel the product and get a detailed understanding before they make a purchase decision," said Alick Ying, business director at Always Marketing Services, which employs 15,000 full-time promoters across China.

The Shanghai-based WPP field-marketing agency, whose clients include Unilever, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft and Johnson & Johnson, hosted Ad Age at a Tesco hypermarket in Shanghai one recent Saturday morning.

A U.S. store has as many as 20,000 stock-keeping units, but a Chinese one can have up to 35,000, Mr. Ying said. Pair this with the tendency of Chinese shoppers to make more than 50% of purchase decisions in-store, and it's clear why brands must work hard to break through the clutter.

Retail growth
China is the world's third-largest retail market, behind the U.S. and Japan. Retail sales in the country have grown at least 16% each year between 2007 and 2011, though sales per capita remain low, according to a report from Smollan Group, another WPP field-marketing agency.

Mom-and-pop stores dominate and most Chinese still buy food in traditional "wet" markets. But the hypermarket segment is growing quickly, and it's fiercely competitive, with major Western players as well as those from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Domestic retailers are also expanding.

In the U.S., promoters are often older women handing out sausage slices on toothpicks. Meanwhile, China's PGs -- for "promoter girls" or "push girls" -- sport eye-catching uniforms, many with short hemlines. They range from the Quaker Oats promoter's blue minidress with frilly apron to the Yili "Children's Growth Milk" promoter's gold satin dress and white pumps.

Surgical masks cover their faces beneath the microphones they wear, speakers slung across the hip. (The masks are for hygiene purposes, since the promoters often hand out food and drink.)

Sometimes there are four promoters or more in one aisle, an aural assault on passing shoppers. The amplification is necessary to overcome the chaos of a Chinese store, which makes a day-before-Thanksgiving American supermarket seem civilized. The Tesco that Ad Age visited has 51 checkout counters. "Western consumers don't enjoy shopping at the hypermarket. They hate it. They want to spend 30 minutes there after work, fill up the car and then leave. Chinese consumers will bring their kids and turn it into a weekend leisure activity," said Serene Tang, who until recently was senior category manager-health and beauty for Tesco in China and previously worked for Tesco in the U.K. and Malaysia.

Lots of Renao
Western consumers "have more entertainment options. They can go to a bar to have fun. Going to the hypermarket is for buying the basics -- food and other necessities," she said. "But Chinese don't feel this way."

A Chinese hypermarket is claustrophobic to Western sensibilities, but local consumers expect renao. (Pronounced "ruh-now," it is literally translated as "heat and noise" and refers to a lively atmosphere like that of a traditional market.) Retailers have tried to replicate renao inside their stores. If it's too sedate, consumers will suspect products aren't fresh or that the store has a bad reputation.

The promotions girls are an important element of the atmosphere. Their amplified sales pitches must win over shoppers who are generally drawn to hypermarkets by the fresh offerings -- vegetables and fruit, eggs sold by weight, meat ranging from unrefrigerated lamb carcasses dangling from hooks to live fish in tanks.

It's apparently a powerful strategy: promotional products (including sale items, bonus activities, sampling and so on) make up 30% of hypermarket sales in terms of value, Ms. Tang said.

At the Shanghai Tesco, a young woman promoting Yili's blended-milk drink called out to an older shopper: "This contains red beans and peanuts, it's good for your blood and especially good for seniors." She offered a sample in a paper cup and tried to entice the woman with an orange hand towel, free with purchase.

In the personal-care section, 21-year-old promoter Ruan Lingli is giving out folding shopping trollies to a steady stream of customers -- free with the purchase of $14 in Unilever shampoo and conditioners.

"For older people, I recommend Hazeline because it's a brand that they recognize. For women who have dyed or permed hair, I'll suggest Dove. And men tend to have oily hair or dandruff, so I tell them about Clear ," she said, speaking in the rapid-fire manner of someone who makes sales pitches for much of her 16-hour shift.

A stylish middle-aged woman stopped in front of the Colgate "Optic White" toothpaste display, then asked promoter Ge Yunxia: Is this the toothpaste being promoted on TV by (Taiwanese celebrity) Big S? What flavors does it come in? Is it new?

The woman inspected the box while Ms. Ge, 24, presented the benefits. "Other whitening toothpastes might work well, but using them constantly will harm your enamel. Our toothpaste works from the inside out. The results won't be as apparent immediately, but you'll notice your teeth whitening over time as you continue to use it," she said.

Satisfied after their three-minute exchange, the customer walked away with a tube of the $4 toothpaste.  |Adage.com

Can China Build a Car That Will Sell?

Qoros, a new automaker from China, is aiming to be the first Chinese car brand accepted on an international level. And it plans to do so by rethinking the traditional auto-marketing standard -- speed and open roads -- and creating a practical, more "social" vehicle suited to urban life. Unlike other Chinese car companies, typically known for substandard, unsafe vehicles, Qoros is a venture between Israel's richest man and state-owned Chinese automaker Chery Automobile. It employs European executives and designers who are veterans of companies like Volkswagen and BMW.

 "We are a Chinese company in the sense that we are born in China, one of our parents is Chinese," said Stefano Villanti, Qoros' head of sales, marketing and product strategy, speaking from his office overlooking Shanghai's Oriental Pearl Tower. "On the other hand, we make international-level product."

He said when Qoros launched in 2007, its execs considered that many cars are rooted in decades-old ideas of speed and the open road -- far from the reality of constant gridlock in so many cities. Qoros wanted to make a car better suited for modern urban life.

 "We thought there was an opportunity to create something different, where the balance is tilted more to comfort, sophistication, digital connectivity -- what we call a social car," Mr. Villanti said.

A digital ecosystem allows the car to connect with the owner's mobile devices via an app and features a touchscreen "infotainment" system. And its sedan model features shoe storage on the passenger side for on-the-go footwear changes and additional space to stow water bottles.

One of Qoros' biggest challenges is overcoming deeply-rooted stigmas against Made in China." Mr. Villanti notes that consumers in China, Qoros' primary market and the world's largest car market, are the most distrustful of Chinese auto brands.

"Someone has to be a game-changer, and maybe Qoros has the opportunity once and for all to change the perception of quality for "Made in China,'" said Arto Hampartsoumian, CEO of BBH China, Qoros' creative agency of record. "Something so visible as a car, if it does live up to the expectation ... then they will be able to change perceptions on a bigger scale."
 ...
Qoros' shops include the Shanghai offices of Mindshare (media) and Agenda (digital). The focus is on telling opinion leaders and consumers who it is and why it exists, Mr. Villanti said.

The company's tagline is "A New Drive." Outdoor ads for the Shanghai auto show, which kicked off this past weekend, show Qoros sedans on an assembly line. It poses the question: "Does the brand create quality, or does quality create the brand?"

The 3 sedan, priced from about $21,000 to $29,000, is scheduled to go on sale in China and Eastern Europe at the end of 2013. A hatchback model set for release in early 2014 will help pave entry into Western European markets.

Qoros' biggest problem may not be the product, but the market into which it's launching, with car sales flat in China and on the decline in Europe. "The concept is good. The timing, however, is unfortunate," said Bertel Schmitt, editor-in-chief of automotive website The Truth About Cars. So does the world really need another car company? "No," Mr. Vallanti said. " Just a different one."

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P&G Early Foothold in China Pays Off

P&G says its Clinicare combats hair aging.

Talk about the health of any consumer-products multinational, and China will inevitably enter the conversation.

Loudly, in Procter & Gamble's case. On an earnings call last week CEO Bob McDonald said P&G has a $3.5 billion to $4 billion business there, far bigger than any rival. There are challenges -- P&G Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller on the call faulted market-share losses in China for the company holding or gaining share in only 45% of its business globally last quarter. Still, P&G's business in China is growing at a healthy clip -- 16% in the last fiscal year -- bettering results from developed markets like the U.S. and Europe.

"P&G is so entrenched in China. They made the investments early and their brands have great cachet now. So, they're kind of like the team to beat," Deutsche Bank analyst Bill Schmitz said.

How has it gotten there? With early investment, insight-driven marketing and product innovations. P&G and Unilever are now about the same size in Asia, both with more than $18 billion in sales, but in China P&G is more than twice the size of Unilever.

In fact, P&G earlier this year relocated the global headquarters for its beauty and baby-care businesses to the Asian business hub of Singapore to better serve consumers in the region. Its ad agencies in China include Saatchi & Saatchi, Grey Group, Wieden & Kennedy, Leo Burnett, BBDO and Publicis. Citing a quiet period, a P&G spokesman declined to make Greater China President Shannan Stevenson available for an interview.

P&G's innovations include skin-whitening products from Olay and SK-II, which play into the dominant mentality in Asia that pale skin is beautiful. Crest toothpaste comes in flavors such as green tea. Tide Naturals has been a success in India, targeting the 200 million families there that still wash clothes by hand.

Chinese consumers buying washing machines for the first time are often given a complimentary packet of Ariel detergent, while Crest teaches kids in lower-tier communities how to brush their teeth.

In China, P&G's Head & Shoulders, Rejoice (formerly known as Pert Plus in the U.S.) and Pantene are the top three shampoo brands, commanding a combined 33.2% market share, according to Euromonitor data. Crest is China's top oral-care brand, while Olay is the top brand in the all-important skin-care category.

Crest Pro Health Complete 7 battles issues caused by 'modern lifestyles.' Crest Pro Health Complete 7 battles issues caused by 'modern lifestyles.'

The crux of P&G's $10 billion cost-cutting plan calls for focusing on its 40 largest and most profitable businesses, the 20 largest and most promising innovations and the 10 most important developing markets. P&G execs have not named specific brands and markets, but Pantene is almost certainly on the list. In China, its marketing strategy plays up concrete benefits to the demanding female consumer in a market where competition is fierce.

P&G has also introduced Clinicare by Pantene, targeting slightly older, higher-income women. The product combats what P&G calls "hair aging." The "Age Defy" campaign by Grey Group used the image of a restart button to educate women that hair ages just like skin does, Ms. Govindji said.

Meanwhile, Crest offers a portfolio of products targeting different demographics. The premium Pro Health Complete 7 toothpaste is aimed at top-tier consumers, while anti-cavity Repair is geared to a nationwide audience.

The marketing was built around the insight that "progressive modern life in China, oral health of Chinese people ... was depreciating," said Justin Billingsley, regional CEO and chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Greater China, which handles creative for Crest. Complete 7 is positioned as fighting against seven oral-health issues caused by modern lifestyles, while anti-cavity Repair combats problems caused by sugary diets.

A key challenge for P&G going forward is stepping up in the beauty category, said Javier Escalante, executive director, Consumer Edge Research. He estimates that China will contribute 30% of the world's growth in the skin-care category over the next four years. Beauty offers high profit margins, and both men and women in China use skin-care products.

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Another Chinese Counterfeit Product: Social-Media Followers

Chen Kun, a Chinese actor

Chen Kun is a Chinese actor, singer and heartthrob who has touted products from Johnnie Walker whisky to KFC chicken. He's also a social media master: On Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, he's listed as having 72.5 million followers. Yes, 72.5 million.

Let's pause to ponder that number: That's nearly 12% of China's Internet users. It's more than the population of France. By comparison, Justin Bieber has a mere 50.8 million Twitter fans around the world.

Clearly Mr. Chen, 38, has a huge fan base, but is the 72.5 million number the real deal?

Surely not, say Chinese social-media experts, who treat such numbers with skepticism, partly because China's Weibo population is swollen with fake followers. They're referred to as "zombie fans," and they haunt brands as well as celebs.

So why would anyone buy zombies to unleash on Weibo, which China's Sina Corp. is preparing to spinoff in an initial public offering on the Nasdaq?

Because size matters, obviously.

One Asian ad exec who asked not to be named described buying fake fans to give an ego jolt to a new venture in China. The rate, he said, was about 5 U.S. cents for a zombie that's just a name, and 16 cents for higher-quality fakes with some content on their profiles. In addition to zombie fans, there's a market for faux re-tweets and comments, too.

It's hard to get a clear picture on the exact size of the problem, or how Weibo's fakes compare to those on Twitter. (Twitter said in its initial public offering filing in October that it believed less than 5% of monthly active user accounts were false, though some observers say the figure is higher.)
Weibo influencers and their followers:

Weibo, which says it has 129.1 million monthly active users and that it is committed to fighting faux accounts, hasn't given an estimate of how many there are.

New questions are being raised about how many Weibo accounts are real and truly active, and about how the platform should define active use. A professor at the University of Hong Kong recently found that 10.4 million Weibo users were responsible for around 94% of all messages, while other users just re-shared those messages or never posted anything, according to an article in the South China Morning Post this week.

Rand Han, founder of Shanghai-based social media agency Resonance China, said fake fans may have PR and vanity appeal, but they have a negative impact on community managers and content.

"Generally you'll see accounts that inflate [numbers] also have very poor, irrelevant content, mostly because the mechanism that tells you how good your content is -- new followers, real engagement -- has been broken," Mr. Han said.

Still, agencies can feel pressured to buy them. It's a cycle that Mr. Han describes like this: "A brand wants 1 million followers but also doesn't have the budget, or resources, or any significant assets to achieve this number [organically], and is also tied down by global guidelines," he said. "Then three agencies pitch and the only way they can win is to promise said numbers. One promises, and due to the lack of support, chooses to fake. When the next agency comes in, they have to keep pace with the previous agency. The only way to do this is to also fake."

How do you fix the problem? Through "education, or introducing new metrics, like active and verified rates, to temper expectations," Mr. Han said.

Sam Flemming, founder and CEO of China-based social business intelligence firm CIC, says more brands are "trying to weed out zombie fans or stop the practices leading to zombie fans."


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Apple Watch Makes Its Fashion Magazine Debut In China

Liu Wen Wearing the device

The Apple Watch will makes its media debut in November, gracing the cover of Vogue China. Liu Wen, a 26-year old supermodel, will sport the Apple Watch Edition, one of three models for the device Apple unveiled in September.

"Vogue China is following in the Vogue tradition of moving with the times, giving our readers the first glimpse of a pioneering piece of technology that also doubles as a highly covetable fashion accessory," Angelica Cheung, the magazine's editorial director, said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for Vogue China said putting Apple Watch on its cover was the magazine's idea. "The styling of the Apple Watch on the cover of Vogue China's November issue is an editorial decision, coming about in the same way the editor and team select and style pieces on all their covers," the spokeswoman said in an email.

Still, cooperating with the request -- the watch won't be available to the public until sometime next year -- signals the Cupertino, Calif. company is looking to cement its brand both in fashion and in the wider world.

For its event introducing the watch, Apple invited press from multiple fashion publications, a first for the company. After the event, Apple hired a top marketer from Gap, adding to its roster of recently acquired executives from fashion and retail. Apple's global retail chief, Angela Ahrendts, who left her position as CEO of Burberry in 2013, is focusing intently on expansion in international markets.
China, in particular, has been an increasing priority for Apple. The nation's slice of the company's revenue expanded from 2%, in 2009, to 16% last quarter.

Pre-orders for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus -- larger smartphones, which have sold more successfully across Asia -- began on Friday morning in China. Within six hours, one million orders were taken by the three largest carriers, according to Fortune.

Apple did not return requests for comment.

The Vogue China cover was styled by Karl Templer and photographed by David Sims, both veteran Vogue contributors. Apple Watch Edition, the product worn on the cover, sports an 18-carat gold casing. The company also released a basic version of the device and an activity-oriented version, Apple Watch Sport. Apple has not commented on the pricing of the products, which will begin shipping in 2015 at an unspecified time.

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The Simpsons Now In Mandarin

“Woo hoo! Now we can reveal Springfield is actually in Guangdong.” That was how The Simpsons’ executive producer greeted news that the hit US show will air for the first time in China. The long-running hit starring the doughnut and beer obsessed Homer Simpson and his irreverent son Bart will be streamed online in China by Sohu Video, reports Variety. The latest season (there are 26 in total, in case you wondered) will be shown with subtitles in Mandarin, in a deal done with the show’s maker Fox.

“The introduction of The Simpsons, a household name in the US, will further enrich our users’ choice of the best American content when they come to our platform. This deal once again demonstrated our commitment in bringing the best experience to our users and tireless efforts to enhance our competitive edge in the industry,” said Charles Zhang, Sohu’s boss. The timing of the deal will strike some as noteworthy, given Beijing has recently banned some US shows from airing on online video streaming platforms . (Week in China)

Going Gaga Over Alibaba

What do Midland Railway and IBM have in common? The answer is they were the largest companies by market capitalisation in the UK and the US when each country reached the apex of its economic dominance in 1914 and 1967 respectively.

Both firms were emblematic of their era. Midland Railway was the biggest coal hauler in the country that had ushered in the industrial revolution. IBM was the leading hardware manufacturer at the dawn of the computer age when American consumers were the envy of the world.But the two examples also highlight how fleeting global hegemony can be.

Few now remember the railway firm, which lost its independence after the First World War thanks to the Railways Act. IBM may still be a colossus, but it no longer ranks in the top 20 global companies in market cap terms.

In fact, when the New York Stock Exchange opens later today, IBM is also likely to be eclipsed by Alibaba, the company now best symbolising China’s ascendance on the world stage. The e-commerce giant priced its IPO in New York last night at $68 per share to the thunderous applause of global investors.

How gigantic is the deal?
Should the greenshoe be exercised, Alibaba’s flotation will raise $25 billion and rank as the world’s largest, beating Agricultural Bank of China’s $22.1 billion debut in 2010. When founder Jack Ma rings the opening bell, Alibaba’s market cap will be $177.5 billion, similar in size to Samsung Electronics. However, the stock price is expected to be much higher by closing on its first day, fuelled by newspaper hype and insistent demand from investors. Enthusiasm for the deal has been overwhelming, notwithstanding the fact that many investors have placed inflated orders to try to get some kind of allocation. The frustrated purchasing power of unallocated institutions, combined with the mass of retail investors who were unable to get into the IPO at all, could easily push the stock up into the stratosphere over the coming few days.
...
How is it likely to perform?
What happens to Alibaba after the initial fanfare dies down depends on what investors believe about its prospects for growth. Shareholders are unlikely to reap the same upside as investors in rivals Tencent and Baidu, which both listed a decade ago when they were less than five years old. Tencent has risen 150-fold since its June 2004 IPO, for example.

Alibaba is now 15 years old, so can we expect similar growth? There are numerous jumbo IPOs of companies with relatively mature business models which have still done well for investors. The most famous is Visa, which listed in March 2008 and still ranks as the largest IPO on record by a US firm. It rose 28% on its first day of trading and has quintupled since then.
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A century of upside?
Jack Ma has no such qualms about Alibaba’s future. In the company’s pre-roadshow filing, he wrote a letter to prospective investors explaining how the company is only at the beginning of a 102-year journey, that will span three separate centuries from its inception in 1999.

Alibaba is not a mature business, its management says. Rather, its digital ecosystem will disrupt and transform all that it touches to the benefit of its Chinese customers and, increasingly, its global ones too.

A few years ago, Alibaba identified three pillar industries. In many respects it has only made inroads into the first one – e-commerce.
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And outside China?
For many Chinese companies, their hallmark of success comes from going global. Alibaba has not really spent too much energy overseas yet, although it has made a number of smaller acquisitions. This is likely to change.

As Jack Ma put it in his recent investor letter: “In the past decade, we measured ourselves by how much we changed China. In the future, we will be judged by how much progress we bring to the world.”

Sohu Finance says one upshot of the IPO is the way it is shaping new perceptions of China’s internet firms. It notes that past listings tended to reinforce the view on Wall Street that China’s online giants were copycats of business models born in Silicon Valley. Thus Baidu was referred to as China’s Google, Renren as China’s Facebook and Sina Weibo as China’s Twitter.

“Of course, there are still many people calling Alibaba China’s Amazon,” writes Sohu Finance. “But this time there are a growing number of Wall Street investors realising that this title is not accurate.” In fact, many have given up trying to apply a simile to Ma’s creation.
 ...
Oh yes, so why didn’t it list domestically?
Some wonder why Alibaba didn’t list in Shanghai – where enthusiasm for buying into the IPO would have been intense.

But Doug Young, who writes the Young China Biz blog, says that this was never a realistic option since Alibaba is incorporated outside China (a common practice among Chinese venture-backed tech firms).

“Such overseas incorporation has not only barred internet giants like Tencent and Baidu from listing in China, but has also locked out other major names like China Mobile and Lenovo, which are also technically incorporated outside China for historical reasons,” he notes. Read more detalied report at Week in China.