Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Jacob Cooke, co-founder of WPIC Marketing and Technologies, and his experiences since returning to China recently. Jacob notes the huge amount of digitization efforts since his last time in China. eCommerce is booming. What was once a convenience has now become a necessity. Digitization now encompasses all parts of society and users now include people of all ages, not just the youth. Masks have always been normal in China. Today, 90% of people continue to ...
Nov 17, 2020•38 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with fashion designer and entrepreneur Bruno Schiavi. With a background in the retail industry spanning 25 years, he has launched many brands internationally with some of the biggest companies and names in the world. His latest brand is Uncle Bud’s Hemp and CBD, which focuses on topicals that cover everything from pain relief to anti-aging to bath and body. Uncle Bud’s products are exclusively manufactured in the U.S. and are sold in over 15,000 stories locally...
Nov 10, 2020•31 min
Today on The Negotiation, we continue our conversation with Kevin Xu, founder and author at Interconnected, “a publication that analyzes businesses and trends from the lens of builders (entrepreneurs & engineers), operators (business managers), investors (capitalists), regulators (politicians and government officials), and how they are all connected.” He is also a contributor for and the co-creator of COSS Media, a knowledge media platform aimed at helping Commercial Open Source Software (CO...
Nov 03, 2020•39 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Kevin Xu, Founder, and Author of Interconnected.blog, a publication that analyzes businesses and trends from the lens of builders, operators, investors, and regulators, and how they are all interconnected globally. Kevin received his Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Brown University before studying both Law and Computer Science at Stanford. He then spent a couple of years at the White House in the Obama administration before becoming an ent...
Oct 27, 2020•32 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Tom Parker, Head of China with the Australian Football League (AFL) and Vice President for the Australia China Business Council. Tom shares his journey in the Chinese business world, beginning in 2007 with the founding of Red Tape Consulting, “a China Advisory business that helped stage the first AFL exhibition match as part of the Shanghai World Expo.” Since 2018, Tom continues to serve a prominent role in the AFL. As Head of China, Tom “drive[s] commerci...
Oct 20, 2020•51 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Bertrand Schmitt, tech entrepreneur, Co-Founder, and Chairman of App Annie, and co-host of the Tech DECIPHERED podcast alongside Strive Capital’s Nuno Goncalves Pedro. Bertrand has been involved in the mobile industry in China since 1999, through what he refers to as its period of “growing pains”. When the iPhone and the App Store came out in 2007 and 2008, respectively, Bertrand quickly saw that they solved, in one go, three big issues in China’s mobile w...
Oct 06, 2020•40 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Jesse Chester, Category Leadership Director at Mars who leads the category leadership organization in Guangdong, China, and in Arkansas, USA. Jesse’s role was to create strategic plans around category growth by working with retailers to help grow the marketplace as a whole. He also contributed to the reinvention of Mars’ innovation strategy. The snack industry in China “runs the full gamut” compared to that of North America. According to Jesse, the Chinese...
Sep 29, 2020•48 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Kimberly Kirkendall, founder and President at International Resource Development, on adjusting to the business environment in China as a Westerner. Kimberly discusses the foundational cultural differences in doing business with the Chinese as opposed to Westerners. She had an advantage getting her start in China when she was in her early 20s, as she was able to quickly adapt to the implicit and analogous manner of speech that is characteristic of the local...
Sep 22, 2020•59 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Aynne Kokas, Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, where she teaches students about U.S.-China media and technology relations. She is also a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia where she does work related to U.S.-China policy, particularly around how corporations and the governments of the U.S. and China interact in the space of media and tech. Aynne is the author of the ...
Sep 16, 2020•33 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Hendrick Laubscher on current and future developments around shipping, warehousing, and logistics networks in China. At first glance, distribution in China may appear more or less similar to the networks and processes of other countries, particularly in the West. However, Hendrick explains that China, by virtue of its 1.3 billion-strong population and well-known penchant for speed, operates at a scale unrivaled by other markets. He points to eCommerce gian...
Sep 08, 2020•49 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Xin Yi Lim, Senior Director of Corporate Development at Pinduoduo and former Technology Analyst for GIC in Singapore and New York. Xin Yi discusses some of PD’s latest developments, including founder Colin Huang Zheng’s recent move into an executive chairman role and news on the company’s agritech initiatives, which include its Smart Agriculture Competition to encourage innovation in both AI and traditional strawberry planting methods. She then goes into t...
Aug 04, 2020•50 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Wei Liang, Professor of International Policy Studies at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She discusses the current state of the Belt and Road Initiative in-depth, as well as China’s current reputation on the world stage amid a variety of crises, not least of which are COVID-19 and the country’s strained relationship with Hong Kong. The Belt and Road Initiative was first announced in 2013 by President Xi Jinping with the ambitious ...
Jul 28, 2020•38 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Gen Kanai, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Animoca Brands and Mentor at Chinaccelerator. Regarding the challenges of entering the Japanese market, Gen says that Japanese customers generally do not pirate software and content. Japan “can be a very profitable market if you can crack the market.” At the same time, it is a challenging market, with many non-Japanese companies having failed in Japan. eBay is a prime example of a failure, while Google, Twit...
Jul 17, 2020•42 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Benjamin Qiu, Partner at Loeb & Loeb LLP. Benjamin is an “attorney focused on the capital market, venture financing, corporate governance, IP asset development, and technology protection & licensing.” He discusses the legal side of startup financing in China, of which he first developed expertise during his time at Innovation Works (China’s answer to Y Combinator), where he served as both fund director and a key member of its legal team. Benjamin h...
Jul 07, 2020•43 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Shanshan Tang, Global Business Lead for Canada at Alibaba. Alibaba’s Vancouver office was opened in 2018 with two main goals: to help Canadian brands (especially smaller ones) sell to China using their eCommerce platform, and to promote cross-border tourism and online and in-store enablement of Alipay. Alibaba was founded as an eCommerce company 20 years ago. Today, it has evolved well beyond that. According to Shanshan, today the platform provides “a mark...
Jun 26, 2020•23 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Barbara Finamore, Senior Strategic Director for Asia at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the author of Will China Save the Planet (2018). She started her career with the NRDC as an environmental litigator, a position she left after getting married to a U.S. diplomat in the 1980s. Her husband took her to China in 1990, when the country was considering its earliest initiatives for sustainable development. Barbara was there to witness first-hand the ...
Jun 17, 2020•40 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Xin Yi Lim, Senior Director of Corporate Development at Pinduoduo and former Technology Analyst for GIC in Singapore and New York. Xin Yi discusses interactive eCommerce, a relatively new term that aims to reproduce the experience of offline shopping by “trying to understand human needs through the community that surrounds each and every one of us.” Pinduoduo has created a team purchase model on a mobile-first, mobile-only platform where, if you buy someth...
Jun 08, 2020•40 min
Today on The Negotiation, we speak with TR Harrington, Co-Program Director at Mobile Only Accelerator and Program Director at SOSV. He is also a Startup Mentor at Antler, Mucker Capital, and Chinaccelerator. TR discusses the mindset and strategies he used to run a Shanghai-based marketing agency in China, and gracefully enact an exit strategy after over a decade of serving as CEO. He says that the key to his success as a foreigner was his ability to adapt to the culture and expectations of the l...
May 22, 2020•49 min
Today on The Negotiation, Todd speaks with author, speaker, university professor, and serial entrepreneur James Lalonde. He shares decades of experiences working in Asia, comparing and contrasting the social, cultural, and political characteristics of Japan, China, and North America to illustrate how these similarities and differences impact each country’s influence on the world stage. James believes that building a business in China as a foreigner does not present any more challenges than build...
May 13, 2020•29 min
Today on The Negotiation, Todd speaks with Justin Mallen, Founder, and CEO of Silk Road Telecommunication. He shares what it is like being one of the few successful foreign entrepreneurs in China, having entered the market during a time when it was far from the economic powerhouse that it is today. Justin says, “China’s telecom infrastructure is owned and operated by three incredibly large, state-owned enterprises: China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile. Back then, they had the one key re...
May 07, 2020•42 min
Today on The Negotiation, Todd speaks with Andrea Fenn, a sinologist and journalist who regularly publishes articles and conducts lectures on China’s fast-paced, ever-evolving digital ecosystem. Andrea is also the founder and CEO at Fireworks, which he refers to as a “post-digital agency”. This is due to his belief that brand growth in today’s digital landscape should go beyond vanity metrics such as likes and followers . Instead, Fireworks focuses on actual conversions. Andrea sheds light on ho...
May 04, 2020•48 min
Today on The Negotiation, Todd speaks with author and educator Mark Greeven. He is a former Associate Professor at Zhejiang University’s School of Management in Hangzhou, China. Today, Mark serves as Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. The biggest difference between teaching at Zhejiang and at IMD is that the former “has all the features of a bureaucracy that you could imagine when it comes to state-run public institutions.” Despite the limitatio...
Apr 28, 2020•33 min
Today on The Negotiation, Michael Zakkour returns to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on the state of retail in China and the rest of the world. Setting the context for the discussion, Michael says that it is not a question of which retailers are doing well, but which integrated systems are. One of the factors that held China together during the worst of the crisis was the “ecosystems for retail, commerce, and communication that Alibaba, JD, Tencent, Pinduoduo, and Kaola had built.” These ecosyste...
Apr 21, 2020•34 min
Today on The Negotiation, Todd speaks with Bay McLaughlin, Co-Founder, and COO at Brinc.io, an early-stage venture accelerator. He describes his partnership with fellow Co-Founder Manav Gupta as unorthodox in that they were not wholly familiar with each other’s backgrounds when they first met. What they did have individually, however, was the self-confidence needed to dive headfirst into a new venture. This attitude of purpose over profit drives many of Brinc’s thoughts on the IoT startup space....
Apr 17, 2020•51 min
Today on The Negotiation, Todd speaks with Dr. Julie Klinger, an expert on the rare earth elements industry whose research focuses on finding solutions for current and potential sustainability issues. Rare earth metals are, in fact, not actually rare. They are as common as copper or lead in terms of their occurrence on the Earth’s crust. The term refers to a family of elements located in the lanthanide series, which makes up the top bar of the “island” found south of the periodic table. Each rar...
Apr 13, 2020•49 min
Today on The Negotiation, Todd speaks with Rick Watson, founder, and CEO at RMW Commerce Consulting. With over 20 years of experience in the eCommerce industry, Rick shares his thoughts on industry giants in China and the U.S. Asked how different Alibaba is from Amazon, Rick starts off by addressing the Western notion that these two eCommerce companies essentially share the same business model—the only difference being that they were founded in different countries. It is inaccurate to assume tha...
Apr 08, 2020•31 min
Today on The Negotiation, Todd speaks with Joshua Eisenman, an Associate Professor of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a senior fellow for China studies at the American Foreign Policy Council. Joshua goes over his four published books on the topic of China and the developing world: China and the Developing World: Beijing’s Strategy for the Twenty-First Century (2007), China and Africa: A Century of Engagement (2012), China Steps Out: Beijing’s Major Power Engagement with the De...
Apr 03, 2020•37 min
Today on The Negotiation, Todd speaks with Sarah Weyman, Chief Growth Officer at Dentsu Aegis Network. She discusses the impact of COVID-19 on Chinese businesses and the future of marketing as the whole world marches on towards the new normal. The outbreak of Coronavirus at the beginning of 2020 fundamentally changed the business world. A few months into the pandemic, those who continue to not only stay afloat but thrive are those companies that, according to Sarah, are the most authentic . Thes...
Mar 26, 2020•38 min
Today on The Negotiation, Todd speaks with Ben Robinson, Merchant Success Manager at Shopify Plus. He shares his experience working with a growing number of large Asia-Pacific brands on the ecommerce platform, with a focus on the Japanese market. Many of the brands Ben works with today are generally “high-growth, high-volume stores that are looking to increase their presence in different markets.” Ben and his team evaluate each company’s business model and operational capability in order to help...
Mar 19, 2020•39 min
Today on The Negotiation, Todd speaks with Ann Lee, author of What the U.S. Can Learn from China (2012) and Will China’s Economy Collapse? (2017). Having risen to fame for predicting the market crash of 2008, today she is a leading authority on international finance and economics. Ann worked on Wall Street soon after graduating from business school, but made the transition to academia in 2006 once she foresaw the credit crisis. In 2008, she was invited to teach on credit markets and credit deriv...
Mar 14, 2020•42 min
