Under the strong competition, domestic China-made mobile phones lend in a defensive state, especially compared with Apple and Blackberry. However, there has been some changes recent years because China now has XIAOMI, a new smartphones manufacturer on the market. Xiaomi gains a lot of profits from customers mainly because of its high cost effectiveness.

I agree with Cap about Xiaomi caters the customers’ demand, but actually I do not think it is the main reason why Xiaomi boosts so fast. From my perspective, high effectiveness affects customers a lot. People like to compare features and device cost before they purchase. Xiaomi is a China-made product, so its price does not include import duties and licence fees. Also, Xiaomi create its own operating system MIUI, so that it does not need to corporate with Google. Xiaomi rains through networking market a lot, and this saved many labour and rents. That’s why Xiaomi has low price, which give the products more opportunities to success. In addition, innovation of Xiaomi is also not a problem, its appearance actually appeals many people. To cater the electronic marketing in China, Xiaomi must produce much higher quality products to survive.

Bozhen (Cap) Li’s blog post: https://blogs.ubc.ca/libozhen/2013/09/19/smartphones-in-china-taking-a-bite-out-of-apple-sept-19/

As for Facebook, nearly everyone knows about it, but not everyone around the world can use it. Like China, the government blocks Facebook start from the launch of Facebook. The official announcement said that this blocking action can keep the safety of both individuals and country, because Facebook was a potential threat to free speech. The government wanted to organize the social opinions as the popularity of China is too big.

As I known from the post of Sophia, China was about to change the blocking from Facebook in the future. I was glad to see this change. It can mean a lot to different groups of Chinese and both Facebook Company. Firstly, the most biggest change would be the dramatic increase of users. Many Chinese people dreams to have Facebook in mainland for a long time, and some of them even use circumvention to realize that. After Facebook works in China, I believe the social networks in the work really can connect with each other, and Chinese users could know different aspects of opinions in foreign countries. On the other side, the competition between social networks in China would be a big problem. I really agree with the ideas that Sophia said about this side. Some platforms, like Tencent QQ, Weixin, and Renren must be threaten, because they all have the same functions. In addition, the entry of Faccbook could also make many opportunities for those excess workers in IT. For Facebook, I believe it may get more stock from Chinese market.

Giyun (Sophia) Park’s blog post: https://blogs.ubc.ca/sophiapark/2013/09/26/in-the-news-facebook-is-given-entry-into-china/

These are many food health issues in China, especially including milk powder industries. Many parents do not trust the quality of milk powder, because there were some cases that local milk powder made children dead in the past. So they prefer foreign brands, like Hipp and Topfer, and they can just overseas purchase.This situation leads a big selling problem to Chinese milk powder industries. The amount of sales dramatically reduced from 2010 to 2013.

On 8th November, 2013, a manager who works in a private enterprise made an announcement. It was said that the plan of acquisitions and reorganizations for milk powder companies was already in the process. The aim for this plan is to reduce the number of milk powder companies to about 50 until 2018. The first company that was got acquisitions was Yashili, by Mengniu. Actually, the reputation of its milk powder products that Mengniu had before was not good. However, Yashili had a very good strong milk powder industry. So after the acquisitions, Mengniu reduced the brand gap compared with others and gained good consumer responses. I believe this kind of acquisitions is really helpful for Mengniu in its milk powder aspect. In addition, those small and unpopular milk powder industries will be purchased by grand and famous company, which is a good thing.

Reference: http://theglobaldairy.com/noticias/mengniu-offers-to-buy-yashili-26633/

Sinopec Limited parent, Sinopec Group, is a Chinese oil and gas company based in Beijing, China. Its business includes oil and gas exploration and it also trades in New York. Nowadays, its reputation is becoming poorer. The latest bout of social negative data showed that in 2012, about 639 customers were judging Sinopec per day. The amount of people has become much more compare with that in 2011, by the publicity of media.  Actually, this oil and gas brand in China is quite famous and successful, and I couldn’t understand why there were so many people abusing Sinopec online.

After this serious negative situation appeared, the new representative of Sinopec, Lv DaPeng, decided to change the phenomenon by some regulations. Mr. Lv said he wanted to build a more open and transparent Sinopec. So afterwards, Sinepec Group opened the company’s everyday data to the society and this policy really worked. Some people stopped judging and started saying good words for Sinopec. The number of people, who abused Sinopec online reduced to the half from 2012 to 2013.

I think controlling social influence is important for any companies, especially for a huge and well-known company, like Sinopec. A good reputation is a condition that customers want to believe their products and services.

Many individuals prefer to shopping online instead of buying things in real stores. Including me, I loved to shop online, because I can buy much cheeper but high-quality goods. Among all of the online shopping platforms in China, there is a biggest one called Taobao, which is now renamed to brand-oriented TMall. MaYun, the person who founded Taobao, was praised by the economic director in China nowadays, because of the high profits that Taobao earned and the good reputation gained from customers. In Taobao, customers can buy anything and everything that can be delivered to their homes, which is quite convenient. Sellers can post both new and old goods online. Those sellers include both private and official copyright sellers.

As “Double-eleven” (a day that people celebrates by shopping, because the promotions in Taobao) went on, Taobao now is focusing on this contest. Many sellers intend to provide different and new promotions to attract customers. In addition, sellers are competing with each other by comparing their sales and profits.

I think Taobao can be a global platform for everyone to shop. It is due to the big demand of low-price and high-quality products, and also the latest trend of shopping online. At least, I am really into Taobao rather than Amazon.

I use Twitter everyday to read the news from different groups of people. Twitter would be the biggest tech company to go public since Facebook. According to its IPO documents, Twitter now has 218 million monthly users and 500 million tweets are sent a day. It is a huge number, and it has not yet turn to a profit. It is a so wried situation. Twitter made a loss of $69 million in the first six months of 2013, on revenues of $254 million. Now the Twitter company says they will sell for between $23-25 a share Today, from a previous target of $17-20.  Unlike Twitter, Facebook increased the number of shares it was releasing to take advantage of the hot demand at the time, a move some analysts say oversupplied the market.

However, the demand for the Twitter shares has been so heavy, and the company is ending the offer a day early. Some experts analysed the data and predicted Twitter may not get profits till year 2015. I think Twitter should simplify its way of application to be a member seeding tweets. Also, improving its convince to surf the internet. The CEO of PrivCo, Sam Hamadeh said raising the share price of Twitter was a action to avoid the previous mistakes.

Reference: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24851054

The latest third quarter sales announcement showed that Samsung had a 26% jump in profit by both sales of smart phones and memory chips. Profit margins have been at historic highs, which made me concerned whether Samsung could do it better or not. Its rapid rise could see that it was becoming the biggest smartphone maker all around the world.

The LS asset management, Kim Sung-soo said, “Like Nokia, Samsung may hit a limit in increasing market share. Apple is also fighting back, signalling an uphill battle for Samsung.” As known, Apple is one of the biggest competitor compared with Samsung in smart phone market. I think that the increasing competition is not a problem to stop the growth of Samsung. More innovative products can help it to sustain the growth rate.

By the way, this just makes me remind of something related. On October, 2013, Samsung Electronics has apologized to Chinese consumers because there was a quality problem with those products which were sold in China. Undeniably, China has become a massively important market for many global brands, including Apple and Samsung. Samsung decided to provide free repairs to solve this problem and I think actually this thing did not exert many negative effects on the growth of sales of Samsung.

Reference: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24665480

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24634589

As we all known, there is a big luxury retail firm called Kering, which was PPR (Pinault-Printemps-Redoute). Kering owns many famous luxury brands, including Gucci, YSL, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga. To be honestly, I prefer YSL rather than Gucci. The latest earnings announcement showed that the sales of Kering grew to only 5.6%, which was totally under the expected growth, 8%. The most important reason was that the sales of Gucci really made shareholders concerned, because it its sales growth just fell to 0.6% in the third quarter. Compared with sales of LV, the operating profits of Gucci were only half from 2012. Besides, the sales of Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta was going to increase year by year steadily. It seems that the position which Gucci had in the luxury world is going to change.

From my perspective, the change of this situation is not only because of the decrease of demand for luxury, but also there are to many competitions in luxury market.  Kering also owns Puma and Alexander McQueen, which make me think that there are also many internal competitors in the same retail firm. Citi analysed that the reasons which attributed Gucci’s weaker performance was its own disruption as Gucci attempted to take itself further upmarket. However, I disagree with that at some extent. It was still due to a decline in demand, and also customers’ performances.

Reference: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24670183

Instagram is a fun and easier way to share photos with parents, friends and colleges and it is really popular among the teenagers. I am one of the big fans and I prefer Instagram rather than Facebook because of less advertisments shown on the main page.

On 10th April, 2012, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg announced that they had agreed to acquire Instagram and that their talented team would join Facebook, too. It took Facebook about $1billion, but after that, Instagram never got profits to give them to Facebook. There was hostility between Instagram and Twitter afterwards that Instagram did not allow to show any Twitter images on the website and Twitter added some collections of filters. Many experts were studying Instagram’s methods of income generation and they believed the most obvious way was to add advertisements in Instagram.

On 3rd October, 2013, the co-funder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom said that the photo sharing services must fund itself. Social media advertising is a booming business in the US. According to research firm eMarketer, advertisers will spend $9.5 billion on social network advertisements worldwide this year. Some high-quility and interesting advertisements may be asserted in photos or videos in the future. If users of Instagram do not like some of displaying advertisements, they can hide those and report why people do not like them so that Instagram can improve the social media advertising. Actually I think this would be a good experimental way to test whether users like those displaying advertisements or not.

Many people are keen on APPLE products so much. One of my friend told me that do not buy iPhone 5C, when I expressed that I wanted to change my cell phones. So I just surfed online to check the products information and also customers responses. What I found was that iPhone 5C had very low sales and its price also drops so much.

Just two weeks after launch, three big electronics retail channels in the USA, i.e. Walmart, Radio Shack and Best Buy promoted the iPhone 5C. The official price with contract is $99 and Walmart dropped the price to $45 which would last to “Christmas”. Best Buy said that the device would sell for $50 with contract after using a gift card. It was kind of 50 percent discount. Moreover, Best Buy also took almost the same promotion to Samsung Galaxy S4. However, the period was only from 4th to 7th Oct. Radio Shack announces the same promotion on the same day too. The only difference was that discount period would end on 2nd Nov.

I had not realized that the price of iPhone 5C could be so low before it released, but now, I believe it may keep dropping in future as currently envisaged. Some sources said that the price drop may be because commission agent changes the sales policy. One iPhone 5S bundled five iPhone 5C before, and now only three iPhone 5C can be bundled. The subsides from iPhone 5S are distributed in very low prices. Although the iPhone 5C has low selling price, APPLE can still get high profits. Because of marketing policy, APPLE cannot change the selling price, but dealears can.