Friday, October 30, 2009

Is ChiNext China's NASDAQ?

ChiNext just started its trading. After one day, things look quite frothy. So frothy that according to Business Week (link here) some foreign institutional investors interested in it are sitting on the sidelines for now. The real question is will ChiNext actually serve as a NASDAQ-style exchange for entrepreneurial high-tech companies. Given that the first 28 companies were hand-picked by the government to list on the new exchange, the signs are not that hopeful thus far. Indeed, one need only look across the river to Hong Kong's weak GEM exchange to realize that new exchanges alone cannot serve to create another NASDAQ when the other institutions supporting tech entrepreneurship are missing.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Acer passes Dell

Acer has finally passed Dell in terms of global computer sales (link here). The rise of Acer and other Taiwanese brands, such as HTC, proves the wisdom of Acer's decision to focus on brand while hiving off its manufacturing operations, including manufacturing services. The Taiwanese fretted for years about their inability to create brands in sad contrast to big Korean brands like Samsung, but since adopting the same strategy for brand that they did for other parts of the value chain (i.e. segmentation of the value chain and then narrow focus on one small slice of the value chain), they have achieved great success without needing the scale and scope of Korean chaebol.