China's October Week Holiday 10.3.12
Welcome to this week's skinny on China. The holiday that started on Monday is one of the biggest of the year in China - the Mid-Autumn Festival and October National Day rolled into one long week. Unlike Chinese New Year when billions of trips are made as Chinese return home to their families, this week is often for pleasure travel. 660 million Chinese are picked to travel, up 8.8% from last year. So wherever you are, whether it's Shanghai or Sydney, it's likely you'll see more Chinese tourists than usual - including an increasing number of independent Chinese travellers. Hopefully those tourists are buying what you're selling. Enjoy this week's skinny...
Chinese Consumers
A Fast Boat To China: How U.S. Companies Are Navigating the Marketing Waters: A survey of US Chief Marketing Officers found 21.5% believe China presents the highest revenue growth for international markets, with an average of 51.5% growth over the past 12-months. Here's 12 pieces of advice on what's working for them in marketing in China.
Home Depot Learns Chinese Prefer 'Do-It-for-Me: Do Chinese like DIY? Why get dirty when there's a plethora of labour who'll do it for cheap. Lessons from Home Depot and other companies not picking differences in the Chinese market.
Lessons From Home Depot's China Failure: Another take on Home Depot's failure in China including Lessons from western businesses in China - those who've misread it like Home Depot & Mattel versus those who've done their due diligence like Yum!Brands.
The Number: $10 Trillion: A five minute video about Michael Silverstein's new book, the $10 Trillion Prize emphasising the importance of engaging Chinese & Indian consumers. Although I'd dispute that Chinese are "much more brand loyal than US consumers" and India's population is 1.4 billion?
Internet & Social Media
Air France-KLM To Develop Chinese Social Media Products: Air France-KLM is investing significantly in Chinese social media as part of it's several-hundred million Euro plan to increase it's competitiveness. No specifics, but they're in talks with Sina Weibo to offer the service abroad
The China Market
Growth In China’s Own Emerging Markets: Growth in China's own emerging markets - some perspective on China's sheer scale.
Mobile Phones
Samsung Retains Top Spot In China's Smartphone Market: If you're developing smartphone apps or optimising your site for Chinese consumers, it's good to know what they're using. Samsung remains the top seller in the Chinese smartphone market with 20.4% of sales last month, Apple picked up a bit from 5.6% to 7.5% and Chinese brands ZTE, Lenovo and Huawei upped their share from 11.8% to 14.3%.
Mobile Industry In China To Evolve As Consumers Crave iPhone 5′s 4G: On the subject of mobile share, some pundits are picking 4G will be the iPhone 5's silver bullet for wooing Chinese consumers - article also includes some good 3G mobile stats for China.
Online Mobile Phone Sales Soar: 10% of Chinese mobiles now sold online. That's 30 million mobiles, up 68% in a year and further emphasizing the importance of the web for Chinese consumers.
Auto
Thanks to Automotive Body Painting, China Auto Shows Are Now Peep Shows: The lengths car dealers are going to in hope of getting the attention of Chinese consumers. Especially curious given pornography is banned in China or maybe because of it.
'Good Enough' Cars At $7K Each Keeps Chinese Consumers Happy: Chinese car manufacturers are cutting costs and lead times - developed in half the time as the established manufacturers abroad. The increasing demand signals some Chinese consumers are more concerned about price than the number of crash tests.
That's the skinny for the week!
If you've missed earlier news or need to learn more, there's a trove of information about Chinese consumers in prior China Skinny Weeklys right here. You can have this delivered to your inbox each week by subscribing for email updates, or if social media is more your thing, please follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Linked In or Google+, or subscribe to our RSS feed. If you have any feedback or suggestions for future articles, please let us know.
