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FAW interested in buying Chrysler

China’s number 1 car manufacturer FAW (First Automotive Works) has shown interest in buying Chrysler, according to this article in Forbes. Last week I already heard this story from a friend in the automotive industry in Beijing, but I sort of dismissed it as a rumour (there had been stories before that FAW would like to buy Chrysler, even when it was not for sale yet).

It would be another major take-over for a Chinese company, after Lenovo’s take-over of IBM computer division. For Chrysler it would be the second take-over by a foreign company in less than 10 years. When Daimler-Benz ‘merged’ with Chrysler in 1998, I was working in the Daimler headquarters in Stuttgart. The German and US cultures were more different than people originally thought, and it took a lot of time to change the company culture. Although I have left DaimlerChrysler almost 5 years ago and I am not too much involved anymore, I still feel it is not one company yet. That fact, and especially the huge losses that Chrysler is generating, now leads Daimler to finally get rid of Chrysler.

If FAW should take over Chrysler, the employees will be in for a big surprise. German culture is one thing, but Chinese culture is a whole lot different. And I wonder what FAW will do with Chrysler, because I don’t believe they will simply keep production in the US. Labor costs are way too high, and working with US labor unions won’t be something FAW is looking for. The Chrysler brand may be interesting, but it would be a high price to pay just for the brand. Chrysler’s technology is not state-of-the-art, although they have some good research and development facilities.

I am not sure if FAW will succeed though, personally I think a US company like General Motors will have a much better chance in take-over negotations. But FAW’s move shows that China’s businesses are emerging on the world stage. Now it is still the US, but soon Europe will be the next target. Thanks to many one-sided media reports, most people there still have no clue what is really happening on this side of the world. Soon they might be in for a big surprise as well.

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Ayi issues

To our surprise our maid was already back in Shanghai when we returned this weekend, because we had not expected her back for at least the next couple of days. We were lucky, but many Shanghai families are still waiting for their ayi’s return. A lot of household staff won’t come back before the Lantern Festival (the 15th day of the Chinese New Year), even though families made arrangements with them to come back earlier. The Shanghai Daily printed a short article about this problem today. According to this report, some people are now paying their ayi’s travel expenses if they come back on time, and others will raise their salaries if they come back on time. One family decided not to wait for her, but took their car and drove a few hours to pick their ayi up in her hometown in Jiangsu province!

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Chinese traffic accidents during New Year

One of my readers just left a link to an article in a Dutch newspaper about traffic accidents around Chinese New Year in China. It appears that over the past week 1100 people died in traffic accidents. Over the past week 227 million Chinese (including me) took either a bus or car to visit their relatives somewhere else in China. According to the short report the fatal accidents went down by 33% due to more police patrols (I did not see them on my 1300 km trip) and a publicity campaign in the media (missed that as well). Most accidents occur because people do not follow the traffic rules – that I fully agree to, especially in combination with a total lack of driving experience.

Well, after reading this I am even more glad I hired a professional driver to drive back my car to Shanghai. He delivered it to us Sunday around noon, he did the trip in two days, because he said it was too tiring to drive in one time. The driver even filled up the car and washed it before handing it back. Great service!

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Job opportunity: i-merge China CEO

i-merge China is looking for a CEO. A Chinese CEO – since a Chinese agency in China, for Chinese clients targeting Chinese consumers has to be managed by a Chinese. In my opinion a great opportunity for the right person, that’s why I decided to help spread the word and put it on my blog (and no, I am not getting any commission). The current CEO, Jan van den Bergh, has built a nice organization with some good clients over the past year or so, and is now starting to look for the Mr. or Mrs. Right to take over from him.

Want to apply? If you’re a true brand lover with at least 5 successful years of experience in advertising agencies then you reached the minimal level.
What else is necessary?
• A strong lead-generating network among Chinese as well as Western marketing directors.
• A rich experience in managing the explosive mix of creative, account and technical people.
• The gift of also keeping an eye into the financial bottom line.
• Preferably also some experience in interactive marketing.
• Even some international experience maybe worthwhile too.
• As well as an energetic dose of entrepreneurial spirit, since i-merge China will become partly your company.

Will the future CEO 100% sure be a former client service director? Not necessarily. It can also be a creative director of course.

If you’re interested pls send an email to Jan van den Bergh at jevedebe@i-merge.net. He is the founder and president of i-merge. For the time being he is also leading the 8 persons’ Shanghai team. But he is not Chinese!

More info about i-merge its people and its activities can be found at their corporate blog.

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Tudou.com in top 25 Chinese websites


During the past weeks not only game.com.cn kept on growing fast, but Tudou as well. I just checked the latest Alexa stats for the website and saw that Tudou is now in the top 25 of biggest Chinese sites (to be exact, Tudou is number 24 today). Worldwide Tudou.com is now number 127, and the site keeps on bigger and bigger!
The graph shows the growth in pageviews for the site over the past 6 months.

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Back in Shanghai – by plane

After spending a week in Beijing, we are back home again in Shanghai. We did not drive back after our experience of driving to Beijing, but instead took the plane. We arranged a driver to fly in from Shanghai to drive back our car from Beijing. It costs some money, but it saved me lots of time and I don’t have the risk of being involved in an accident. After we had arranged this I met up with an old friend working at a car multinational, who told me he could have arranged shipping of our car for free on one of their car trucks. Maybe for next time?

The time we spent in Beijing was great. Meeting up with old friends (mainly Chinese, most of the foreigners I knew there have left China over the past years), going to my favourite restaurants (when they still existed) and just strolling around the city. Having my own car with a big advantage, so I could all around the city and go to places that I had not been to in years.

Beijing has changed a lot, and that’s a pity. Many of the places outside the fourth ring road where I went for a run or mountain biking in the past are now new residential areas. The city has become a lot bigger. We went back to the place where I lived when I started my entrepreneurial career in 2002, Guang Da Hua Yuan in Haidian district. That was at the very edge of town at the time. From the building we could see the mountains around Xiang Shan and I could run along the canal to the Summer Palace. The place is hardly recognizable anymore. It is one big urban jungle full of cars, restaurants, shops and apartment buildings. There is now a big road along the canal, and there is no place to run anymore. Too bad, the quality of living does not necessarily increase with more roads and shopping centers.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the prices for parking in Beijing had not changed. In Shanghai you pay a minimum of RMB 15, even if you just park 10 minutes along a quiet street in the French Concession. But parking along the street in Beijing is just 1 or 2 RMB per hour, and the most expensive place I parked was in the parking garage below the Grand Hyatt (Oriental Plaza) where it only cost me RMB 5 per hour. A huge difference with Shanghai!

Today we flew back, and although it is one of the busiest days of the year we managed to get a 30% discount on our ticket. Beijing airport was very crowded, but has become much more efficient in handling the crowds. We were checked in and through customs within 10 minutes. Shanghai airport can still learn a lot from this. The plane was completely full as expected, and due to turbulence it was a bumpy ride. But much better than driving the 1300 kilometer myself!

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Bomb It – one billion times played!

One of the things that Spill Group Asia does is the production of flash games for the Spill Group gaming portals worldwide. These games can easily be copied (we even encourage that), so people can put them on their own websites. This is good for us, because every game contains our logo and a link to our site. We can monitor where traffic comes from on our portals, and based on that we can estimate how often a game has been played.

I always thought our flash games would be played a few million times per month, but it turns out that I was quite a bit off in my guess. Our most popular game, Bomb It, has been played over 1 billion times already over the past 2 months. That’s huge! Note that this is not only on Spill Group’s worlwide game portals, but also on the hundreds or possibly thousands of other gaming sites that carry this game.

It was actually surprising to me that this game is so popular, because it is relatively difficult to understand and play. Maybe games that are not very easy, are the ones that people play over and over again. Another important factor is that the game is never the same when you play it, the levels are always different.

If you want to try it, you can be play it here on our servers in China, or here in an English version.

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North Korea documentary

In 2001 I visited the DPRK (North-Korea) for a week, which was a very strange experience. Although it was a vacation, I was glad to be back in China afterwards, and I felt like I needed another holiday in order to get back to reality. On this trip I met among others Dan Gordon and Nick Bonner (Nick’s company Koryo Tours had organized the trip). It later turned out that Dan was preparing a film about the DPRK during the week we were there. He had a DV camera with him all the time and was shooting a lot of footage, but at that time nobody knew why he was doing that. This footage later became the basis for his first documentary ‘The game of their Lives’, about the North-Korean soccer team that made it to the soccer World Cup finals in 1966.

Dan and Nick have since made several films about life in the DPRK, and the lateste one is about a US defector who has been living there since 1962. The 90-minute film, that premiered at last month’s Sundance festival, is titled ‘Crosssing the Line’. There used to be 3 other US defectors, but they either died, or finally managed to leave (Robert Jenkins). They were the first foreigners to meet Mr. Dresnok in 45 years. Mr. Dresnok says he does not want to leave anymore, although he once tried to get asylum in the Russian embassy. It turns out he also has an 18-year old blonde son now, who looks British but is completely Korean.

CBS’ 60 minutes interviewed Dan and Nick about their latest documentary, and show a lot of footage about the DPRK and Mr. Dresnok. I enjoyed every second of the 13-minute program, even though I had to wait an hour to load the whole program due to China’s internet firewall. Fascinating stuff!

The 13-minute program on CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=2405878n
A 7-minute, less interesting, version on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZtkHUkZ8Rg

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New record for game.com.cn

Last month I proudly wrote that game.com.cn had achieved 1 million page views. But the site has kept on growing at an unbelievable pace over the past 6 weeks and reached another milestone this weekend. Sunday, the first day of the Lunar new year, we managed to get more than 2.5 million page views in 24 hours!

Demi & the team: one again fantastic work over the past weeks. You really deserve your New Year holiday, so enjoy it with your families and friends. I owe all of you a nice lunch or dinner after we are back in Shanghai. Thanks for this great start of the Year of the Pig!