This weekend I went to the BMW Asian Open at the Tomson Golf Club in Shanghai. This event, part of the Asian tour, has been organized in Shanghai for the past 3 years at this golf club, and it is attracting quite a crowd.

Yesterday was the last day, and Jim and I decided to get there early to walk with some of the lower placed players. Jim’s driver dropped us off at the entrance, saving us a 15 minute walk from the parking lot. We watched two players tee off at the 10th, and then went over to the 15th hole, where fellow-Dutchman Robert-Jan Derksen was playing. We followed him for 3 holes, with a small group of other people.

It’s amazing how good these guys are. It seems none of their shots go wrong, it all seems so easy. At the 17th par 3, there is a water hazard over the full lenght of the hole, and the green is right behind it. I would always opt to go for a first shot to the fairway on the right of the lake, but these guys go directly for the green – and manage to get there with one shot as well. As Jim said:”We will never be good at this sport, because we just don’t have the guts to make such a shot”.

Tomson Golf Club is surrounded by some very nice villa’s. However, some of the (mainly Chinese) occupants overdid the decoration: fake Louis XVI interiors could be seen in several houses around the course, as well as people who managed to build a complete pagoda in their front yard. The villa’s don’t come cheap I suppose, a BMW 7, Porsche Cayenne or Mercedes S-Class seems to be the standard car for the people living here.

After a quick lunch (mediocre food, the catering was done by a Chinese fast-food chain that among others offered a noodle hot dog: a bun filled with spicy noodles – no sausage to be found!) we went on to look at Fernandez-Castano and Stenson’s tee-off at the 1st hole. They both seemed quite relaxed. After their tee-off the crowd grew too big, and we went over to hole 4 and 5, where we watched among others Colin Montgomerie. The finale of the Asian Open was great: In the final 3 holes Fernandez overtook Stenson, but Stenson took a huge risk at the 18th and managed a birdie. Then a play-off was necessary in which Fernandez saw his tee shot land in the woods. But with a superb second shot, followed by an amazing chip that landed the ball only centimeters from the hole, he managed to grab the title.

I am not a big fan of watching golf on TV. But seeing this sport live, and being able to interact with the top players (there are not many other sports where you can do that), is a different story. The atmosphere was great, although some of the audience should have stayed home: some did not turn their mobile phones off, were talking loudly with business guests they brought over, or took their little kids here that scream for attention during the silence of a tee shot. I’ll be back next year!

Yesterday the Shanghai court reached a verdict in the case of the fake Louis Vuitton bags that werre sold in Carrefour in Shanghai (see my blog entry about this). The company that operates the Carrefour shops argued that they did not know the bags were fake, so they could not be forced to pay compensation. But the court did not agree witht that and ordered them to pay RMB 300,000 in compensation to LV (LV had sued for RMB 500,000). It makes you wonder what other fake products are sold in Carrefour!

This reminds me of a story I heard a few years ago in Beijing. I had dinner with Don St. Pierre (he used to head Beijing Jeep in the mid-1980’s, and who now owns ASC wines. The Chateau St. Pierre wines that you see in many restaurants are his invention.), who told me that many wines sold in China are actually fakes. It is very simple, he said. What happens is that cheap wine from countries like Bulgaria is bought in bulk, and bottled in China. Then the crooks print fake French labels and put them on the bottles. These bottles are then sold as real French wines to unsuspecting stores and wholesalers. Note: I do not imply that Carrefour is doing this. Carrefour is actually one of the few stores in China where I dare to buy wine (next to ordering online at ASC wines of course).

Yesterday I went to Beijing to attend the China Mobile Game Forum 2006. This was a forum in the Kerry Center Hotel, where content providers, service providers and VC’s discussed the current status and the future of mobile gaming in China. A very useful meeting, where we (Demi Wang, marketing director for Spill Group Asia, also joined) met many potentially interesting companies to work with in China. I also blogged about this on marketingfacts.nl, the article (in Dutch) can be found here.

After the event was over I went over to Carlo Crosetto’s house. We had a drink at his place, and then went for dinner at Ya Wang (Duck King) at Jianguomenwai. My wife managed to take two hours off her incredibly busy schedule (she is working 18-hour shifts right now) to also join the dinner. The food was excellent, with among other kaofu, sharkfin soup, and of course a whole roasted duck. Thanks Carlo!

I had decided to stay overnight in Beijing (Qi lives in the Radisson Hotel, so I did not need a hotel room), and take an early flight back. But the early flight turned out to be a major problem: the first available flight to Shanghai was at 11:50 AM. Because I had a meeting planned in Shanghai at 12 this was a bit difficult. But I could not change it, all planes were fully booked. I wonder what’s going on, in the past I just went to the airport and bought a ticket for the first available flight. But that does not seem possible anymore.

Getting to the airport was also not easy. Because of an accident on the airport express way this road suddenly closed, and we were stuck there. But then the cars collectively decided to back up to the last exit (only a few hundred meters for us) and take a different road. Quite an interesting sight, hundreds of cars driving backwards on an expressway. And that without any further accidents! I told the driver an alternative route (I used to live – and drive – in Beijing for 3 years), and we just made it in time to the airport to catch my flight.

Suppose you would want to buy a Louis Vuitton bag in Shanghai. You could go to the Xiangyang Market where you can buy a fake one for less than RMB 100. But if you want to buy a real product you’d better go to an international chain store, to make sure you get the real thing. Carrefour for example. And what does the bag cost there? Only RMB 49.90 (less than EUR 5) as employees of LV found out! Because the retail price is normally around RMB 9000 this did not smell right. And indeed, the bags were as fake as they could be.

LV is now taking its fellow-French company to court in Shanghai. Carrefour defended itself yesterday by saying that they stock 36000 different items, so things can go wrong sometimes. OK, but selling fake LV bags for half the standard Xiangyang market price? Well, Carrefour said, the problem was with their bag supplier. A representative of this company was also in court, and he explained what happened. They were not able to deliver enough goods, so they went to a roadside vendor, bought 40 bags and delivered them to Carrefour as their own products. This little mistake might cost Carrefour RMB 500,000 in damages plus RMB 100,000 in investigative costs. But it’s nice free publicity for them, and Chinese don’t care about IP infringements anyway.
(Source: Shanghai Daily)

Another Spill Group Asia site has gone live: games.net.cn, our third online gaming site in mainland China was launched last night. The next sites that we plan to launch are websites outside China, they are similar to the sites that we now have running here.

Off to Beijing now for a conference on mobile gaming, another big market that we want to enter with Spill Group Asia later this year. More about this later.

On Saturday morning I got up at 9:30 AM to watch the Chongming island cycling race on the Sports Channel of STV. Marcel Ekkel is helping the Marco Polo cycling team, and he had told me the first leg would be live on TV. The program did indeed start at 9:30, but the first full hour was completely dedicated to speeches from government officials and dance performances by local school children. The cyclists had to participate as well at the beginning of the performance by riding over the stage, so they had to wait in their racing outfit for an hour before they were allowed to start (it was only around 12 degrees!).

The race finally started around 10:30. STV’s presenters were explaining the audience everything about cycling, likely most had never watched this before. They also said that when a TV station was able to cover a cycling race they are considered a top-tier TV station, because it is a difficult event to show on TV. Well, then STV is not a top-tier TV station: they only had fixed camera’s (no mobile ones on motorcycles like in the Tour de France) and missed all the interesting events. The presenters announced for example that there would be sprints at the end of the 3rd, 6th and 9th lap, but none of these were shown on TV. Let alone that the results were announced.

But the worst was still to come: at 11:40, so 2 hours and 10 min. after I started watching, the presenters suddenly announced that they would now start another program because there had not been enough time scheduled in the planning. So I missed the finish of the race… First they show an hour of boring dances and even more boring speeches, and because of that they do not have enough time to show the final part of the race. A top-tier TV station? Come on guys, do your homework before you plan to broadcast another cycling race.

I am having some trouble keeping my eyes open this morning, after the 1st Toodou Party last night. Luckily a large mug of Starbucks Coffee does wonders.

The party was a big success, with even more people than during the first two parties (Graffiti Party in November & Life is a Game Party in January). This time there was a rock band playing in the office. The band “Limit” played a mix of its own songs combined with covers. The covers even included two Beatles songs, a strange combination.

An interesting mix of people showed up, from fellow bloggers (Shanghaiist) and podcasters, current & ex-colleages from my current and past ventures, to TV presenters and even friends from overseas (Marcel Ekkel from Hong Kong). Of course all the regulars were there as well, such as producer Matthew Peregrine-Jones (working in Shanghai again), film director David Verbeek, and of course Thijs Bosma (whenever there is a party in Shanghai you’ll find him :-). Even Sierk Vojacek and lawyer Wen Li came by around 11 PM (after a meeting – on Saturday night!) – nice to see you here Sierk.

As usual at this kind of party most people leave before midnight. We continued on for another hour with Wodka and Dutch Corenwijn (a lethal combination as Marcel found out the hard way), before dragging ourselves into a taxi. Once again a great night in the Toodou office. Thanks everyone for coming!

Some pictures can be found here.

The Shanghai Daily reported today that over the past 10 years Chinese women have become both taller and gotten bigger chests (the word breast was carefully avoided).

The chest circumference of Chinese women increased by nearly 1 cm in the past 10 years, the Beijing College of Clothing Technology found out in a recent study that focused on changes in figure for Chinese women. The study also found that Chinese women are 0.5 centimeters taller than in the previous period. These changes are mainly due to better food and more exercise.

The average height of 6000 women in China’s North measured 162.82cm and their average chest circumference was 83.54cm. Because Northern women are generally taller than woman from Southern China the average figures for China as a whole will likely be a little lower.

These figures are especially important for the underwear industry in China. This is a fast growing sector, and according to the report sales of underwear in China will hit more than 60 billion USD in the next five years.

That seems like a very high figure to me, because it would mean that the average person in China would spend almost 50 USD per year on underwear! In the big cities this could be true, but in a country where most people still live in the countryside this is very hard to believe.