I’m not much of a prophet (if I was, my portfolio would be considerably larger), but I’m going to go out on a limb and make some predictions regarding 2013. Come January 1st 2014, you all have a right to heckle me for being so terribly wrong. (This should have gone up yesterday, but I’d just flown back from HCMC and didn’t feel like writing.)
“It works in the West, the Chinese must want my service!”
“I can outperform a Chinese competitor. I am smarter than they are and have more money.”
“My product is globally accepted, the government won’t have a problem.”
Famous last words, says Hult guest professor and e-business entrepreneur Toine Rooijmans. The Chinese ecommerce space is famously littered with the corpses of foreign companies that thought they had it figured out, only to find themselves a smear on the pavement of China’s crowded information superhighway. And we’re not talking about small-time entrepreneurs here- eBay, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Groupon and, most notoriously, Google, have all found themselves shut out of- or crushed by- the Chinese market.
