Monthly Archives: October 2012

This post is a comment to Tsoi luna’s blog Casino in Downtown Toronto.

After reading through this article, the first thing came to my mind was: this project would bring many benefits to this city.

The first benefit is that the casino and the gambling industry will significantly stimulate local economy. More exactly, there will be much more cash flowing in this city by the gambling and a huge number of gamblers or tourists will be attracted, which could increase the demand for accommodation and positively affect local tourism.

As Luna concerned, the new casino may attract too many people that leads to destroy the peacefulness in that area, but I think this should not be a issue to be worried for local community. As can be seen from the picture in the article, the new casino is located in Downtown Toronto and next to the CN tower, which shows its location is already a busy place instead of a residential area. The casino building will be a conspicuous landmark that could make a better image for this city. Moreover, gambling should not be always seen as a potential threat for the security, for most legally operating casinos, they do not pose any security threats to the local community.

So people do not need to worry about the peacefulness will be destroyed and the security will be under threaten. The establishment of this casino will bring more benefits than drawbacks to both local communities and the city.

This post is a comment to Ruru Lee‘s blog HTC in the competition

I used to be a HTC cellphone user, so I was interested in Ruru’s article about HTC.

It says HTC’s net profit has fallen 79% and the competition in smartphone market is getting fiercer, HTC is rivaling against a few experienced and powerful competitors like Samsung, Apple and Nokia. In terms of technology, it is quite difficult for HTC to improve a lot to beat its competitors up in such a open market where the competitors have equal level of innovation. So I agree what Ruru stated in the article that HTC’s national marketing campaign with tailored phones to the Chinese, would twist the situation, which means HTC needs to explore a new market that more fits itself. Furthermore, personally I find HTC releases its new products frequently and every release does not have too much change compared to the last generation, so I would recommend them to focus more on their products’ quality rather than quantity, which will bring more surprises to consumers.

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-‘Shanzhai’ refers to Chinese imitation and pirated brands and goods, particularly electronics.(Wilkipedia)

With the increasing popularity of Apple product，there are many Chinese manufacturers begin to produce unofficial Apple product with a very low price, which is also known as Shanzhai Apple product. As can be seen from the pictures, obviously, the Shanzhai product has much worse quality, accordingly, they always have extremely low price. As I searched on ‘Taobao’, the Shanzhai ipod 3^rd is around 13$.

In my point of view, the existence of Shanzhai product can be seen as a sign of Apple’s success, only if the company is successful and the product is popular, those manufacturers will follow and try to imitate it to make a profit, but imitation cannot exist for a long time. Innovation and creativity of the technology are the key factors to make a difference on people’s life.

Taobao Marketplace is a Chinese language website for online shopping, similar to eBay and Amazon. It facilitates consumer-to-consumer retail by providing a platform for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online retail stores. Basically, consumer can get every single daily article from there, such as clothes, electronic devices, cosmetics, food, jewelry, books, etc.

The most attractive part of Taobao is its reasonable price of goods, online retail stores substitute virtual retail stores, which lowers the cost from renting a place and hiring numerous sellers.  Moreover, it has established an efficient logistic s system that is able to deliver all the goods to costumers in a short time. And its identifying secure trading platform enables consumers to finish the trade by easily clicking the ‘OK’ button.

Generally speaking, the reason why Taobao succeeds is that it can be well catering modern people’s needs, specifically; it saves both time and money for consumers and brings too much convenience. Its success is a result of good use  of E-Commerce.

Best Buy first stepped into Chinese market in 2006, after five years ‘survive’, it exited Chinese market without any provocation.

Back to 2010, I went to Shanghai and was actually shopping in one of Best Buy retail stores. And there were two the most famous retail outlets called Gome and Suning right close to it.  Compared to those two local companies, Best Buy’s retail stores have better shopping environment where costumers are able to sit in the couch to play new released PlayStation or watch TV; meanwhile, it definitely has better service for customers, many professional technique assistants are available to customers. However, Best Buy focused on its high quality service instead of price of product, which is the most significant factor for most Chinese consumers.  Three electronic retail stores offer pretty much the same product; there is no doubt that consumers would prefer to buy the cheaper one.  Thus Best Buy loses its price advantage and leads itself to a relatively high-end market that gets less attention.

All in all, Best Buy didn’t get Chinese consumers preference very well, which is their extreme price conscious nature. And it had two too strong local competitors that posed a big threat to it.

Reference:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Buy

On August.24^th, 2012, Harbin Yangming Bridge completely collapsed; four big trucks fell to the ground, which caused five injuries and three deaths.

Then the government announced the official explanation; the main reason of this accident was because those trucks were overloaded, which could not even convince the public. The public doubted that, they held the view that the main reason was the terrible quality of the bridge.

When it comes to the quality of the bridge, it is closely related to the construction company’s ethic, as I know, many construction companies in china want to maximize their profit, accordingly, they try to use cheap material and to hire cheap architects to lower their cost. As a result, we can always see the media reports that the bridge collapsed, a relatively new road is broken, etc. As the company that is in charge of building infrastructure for the city, it should shoulder its responsibility and ensure accomplish the project with high quality rather than profit at the expense of people’s safety. If a company loses its ethic, it will gradually lose its reputation and be kicked out of the market.