Anything interesting you noticed over there over the past couple days?  You would’ve watched a group of geeks across the pacific enthusiastically web chatting and digging from the inside out about the stellar transaction volume of two Chinese commerce sites–Taobao and Tmall

The new world record in online shopping

They were talking about the annual Chinese online shopping carnival on November 11, during which day Taobao (an eBay-like marketplace) and Tmall (a B2C platform) totaled RMB 19.1 billion (approx. 3.06 billion CAD dollar), making the number a new world record. Previously the record belongs to the 2011 “Cyber Monday” in the US, where total sales was $1.25 billion according to com Score’s statistics.

And what else intrigued the geeks? Well, these threads(let’s just ignore the slightly ‘unpleasant’ part as such stuff comes along with almost anything labeled China) might help explain a little bit

• Total sales: 19.1 billion RMB
• In the first 1 minute, 10m people had visited Tmall
• Top 5 provinces by #sales: Zhejiang, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Beijing
• 1hr after the promotion opened, the first package was received.
• After 12 hours, 109 stores had made more than 10m RMB sales.
• The two biggest mens clothing brands : Jack & Jones and GXG
• Tmall made 13.2bn RMB, taobao made 5.9bn RMB
• There were 213m registered accounts were active on this day (40% of China’s internet users)
• 105m orders – av. order value of 180RMB
• 3 stores made more than 100m RMB on the day.
• There were 7m mobile accounts active in the first 1 hour.

By 2 pm, 520m RMB of sales had been made via the mobile interface.

Creating a new business is a risky proposition.We talked about  how preparing a detailed business plan can help you anticipate and plan for a successful future.

Content of the  meeting of our club

A sound business plan helps to protect not only the owner of the company but also any associates that choose to join the venture.

While you may not be able to anticipate every detail, having a plan will allow you to mitigate risk and focus on building the business.

An effective business plan should include not only financial details but also guiding principles and ethics that will form the personality of the company.
Business plans are not set in stone; they should change and adapt to the company’s growth and progress.

Ideas for Action

Writing a business plan can seem overwhelming. Outline the key areas of your business plan, and then break up the plan into manageable sections. Set aside at least 30 minutes every day to work on a section.

Imagine you were joining your company as an outside associate. What would you want to know about the company ahead of time? Make a list and include these factors in your plan.

A mission statement can help you define the overarching values and ethics you want your company to uphold, as well as delineate the purpose of your business. This week, write up a draft of your mission statement. Have a trusted advisor critique it and use the feedback to improve your plan.

As your vision changes to reality, review your plan on a regular basis, either weekly or monthly. Update any sections that have changed drastically, whether related to finances, personnel, equipment needs, or other aspects of the business.

Canada

Be open and welcoming

Be friendly

People are very polite and you are expected to be polite too

Canadians tend to say “sorry” a lot

Ethical practice is most important

Watch out for cultural differences

Canada is a multicultural country

Canada is officially a bilingual country

(English and French). French dominates the province of Quebec  

Canada is very multicultural and promotes diversity – impact on customer segmentation and advertising (e.g. labels must be in French and English)

Charge higher than normal prices because no one will complain

Fill in your tax forms correctly

Be sensitive to (or avoid) comparing Canadians to

Americans Canadians don‟t like to be  thought of as “just like Americans”is a very common practice to tip when receiving services

To improve the production structure of a carvertising company, I believe that we can add advertisements designing department to the company. The designing advertisements will be one of our key activities, and designers are our key resources. Designing advertisements is a high technology job and the new department will make the structure of the company more reasonable. If we supply designs rather cooperate with other companies, we will reduce a lot of costs. Since we used to pay a lot of money to the designing company, the salaries which we are going to pay for our own designers are a lot less. More over, using our own designs will also improve our brand effect and popularity. People are tended to believe a company which has a complete system in production, development sales and service. This new change of industrial structure will not only bring us more much economy benefit, but also will enhance the company’s reputation. Using others’ designs rather ours can be dangers for we just do the no technical content work and depend on others as for the designing works. This change will form the core competitiveness of the company.

As we all know, the smart phone of Blackberry is not for entertainment or, in other words, they are not designed to be play. The entertainment function may be not as powerful as other smart phone like sumsung or Apple, but it still has a broad market. The main reason for this phenomenon is that the company only focus on parts of consumers and satisfy their demand. Though Blackberry dose not develop a lot of software for their smart phone to make them more attractive to the youth, they still have a lot of loyal customers who look the entertainment software in their phone as redundant things.

Living in a changing world, the only way to be successful is changing ourselves.

With fierce competition in job market, we should be as variable as the weather in Vancouver. The sun shined in the morning, and then downpours battered the city in the evening. The people in Vancouver have already get used to this unsettled weather and are fully aware of what to do: as the change of weather and change themselves.

In the market as well. The demand of the customer can be very hard to forecast. Many new product are being produced all the time. No one is sure about which product can catch customer’s eyes and which fails. When there is a new business opportunity, we must catch it as quickly as possible and should not be afraid to change. Just like Sumsung, it reacted quickly and changed itself. Faced with the big challenge from Apple, it dose not lose its opportunity and win itself a vaster development space. To the contrary, Kodac should have had an opportunity to adjust its product to the market requirment, but it chose to stay there and do nothing. The decision they had made led to the death of their company.

I participated a small Discovery Club which includes 5 persons totally. I want to prepare some topics about business, economics, commercial law, etc. for choosing to discuss in the Club meet.
Recently, I am busy with preparing an investment environment research report – one part of a Business Plan. It is very complex, interested, valuable, and be worthy of learning and discussing.

I. Definition
What’s business plan?
Business plan is also named as feasibility study. It is a report and drafted by professional person or team by a series of market investigation and research works to ensure the feasibility of an investment project.

II. Phases
Business plan includes a lot of phases. Mainly as followed:
1. Introduction
Introduce the purpose, process, announcement, etc.
2. Investment Environment
Including without limitation the history, geography, climate, culture, politics, social safety, macro economics, special production, industrial level, service line, development plan, market scale, foundation facilities, trade relations, financial environment, commercial cost, authorized department, relative laws and decrees of the target country or region.
3. Production Market
4. Competitors
5. Production Economics
6. Produce Factors
7. Technics
8. Marketing
9. Labors

A comaney ‘s ethics will determine it’s reputation. Good  business ethics are essential for the long-term success of an organization.

As we all know, Haier, an seccessful company in China, have a lot of branch offices around the world. Its performance is adored by many counterparts. However, most of us just know how successful they are, we are not familiar with the reasons why they have such an outstanding achievement.

The most imprtant reason for their success can be that their great manager attachs a great importance to their companey’s ethics. For example, In 1985,after a quality inspection, 76 products were not qualified, according to the sales market, the refrigerator with a little maintenance could be sold. However, the factory director Mr Zhang immediately decided, in front of all employees, the 76 refrigerators would all be smashed up. A refrigerator was 800yuan  at that time, however the worker’s average wage was only 40yuan a month, a refrigerator was almost equal to a worker’s wages for two years. When workers were suggesting that if these refrigerators could be sold to them, when Mr Zhang said: “If I sold them in a cheaper price to you,it would tell you that you can produce this kind of refrigerator with defects. Today is 76, tomorrow is likely to be 760 units, 7600 units… therefore, we must solve this problem.”

This  news was very famous in China at that time. Their enterprise spirit and their business ethics explain their exellent performance. The persue of the business ethics wins them a long-term profit.