October 2009
6 posts
HKUST to Guangzhou (8 easy steps)
I went to Guangzhou this past weekend, China’s third largest city. It’s a great cheap and spontaneous trip from HKUST. To get there takes at least 3 to 4 hours, which involves a ton of different transportation systems. To illustrate, I’ll lay out how ridiculous a single small trip gets…
1. Four sets of lifts and walk to the HKUST bus stop (15 minutes)
2. Choi Hung bus...
Chinese investment diversification
Currently the economy in China tends to favor large, local, diversified businesses. Markets lean towards info asymmetry, which makes it difficult for private investors to diversify. Therefore, the only real safe way for investors “spread out their eggs” is to invest in one large company that operates in many industries. The thought is that a large company has a huge brand image to...
Foreign brands in China
In related topic to my last post, Coke recently tried to purchase Huiyuan (China’s largest juice drink company). However, the deal was shot down by the Chinese government (even though the proposed price was likely inflated). In this case the proposed acquisition probably fell under China’s new anti-trust laws.
However, ever since opening up their borders, China has often placed...
可口可乐 - Coca-Cola branding in China
In my intro to Putonghua (Mandarin) class, I learned that Coca-Cola translates roughly into “tasty happiness”. Pronounced kě koŭ kĕ lè.
可 (kě) = to permit
口 (koŭ) = mouth
乐 (lè) = happy
Some Chinese characters do not mean anything individually. Only when combined with other characters do they take on meaning. In this case however, the individual characters give a general idea...