Tech-savvy Chinese continue to embrace the future

FOUND (the new) Woodstock in downtown Beijing. All of it neatly wrapped up in one suitably retro-looking building, inhabited by wannabe wish-we-weres, some washed-up have-beens and many never-wills. Ambition is a beautiful thing. Inside the bookcased and wood-panelled interior, patrons chomp on overpriced, underwhelming nosh. They seem to be more interested in sizing up people walking through the door, though, than making sure the eggs on their plates come from an organic farm in Inner Mongolia which rears its chickens on ethicallygrown grass from Tibet. Poor chickens.

Outside on the deck overlooking squalor and splendour, poseurs puff earnestly on pipes dangling from their mouths ring-fenced by coiffed beards, all trying desperately to stand out from the crowd.

Same same, but different, as the T-shirt says.

Fortunately Beijing (and the whole of China, for that matter) is massive and diverse enough to offer experiences suitable to a multitude of palates, pockets and persuasions.

And enough of its population has enough money to feed and sustain healthy competition across industries, despite China’s stock market crash which, as widely reported, wiped $3.5 billion (R43.7bn) off the bourse in about three weeks recently before Beijing stepped in and took a number of extreme measures to control the slump. By end of trading last Tuesday, 90 percent of trading had been suspended to stop the panic-selling.

Luckily for most Chinese people, the stock market plays a limited role in financing, with fewer than 10 percent of households exposed to the market.

Also, companies have been moving with the technological times, unashamedly mimicking what has been successful elsewhere and setting up businesses which have proven to be wildly successful.

Take the taxi-hailing app industry, for example. China’s Didi Kuaidi has 80 percent of the market and has recently announced that it raised $2bn (breaking Facebook’s record of $1.2bn in a single round of fund-raising) and that its cash reserve now totals $3.5bn.

The company said it would use the cash for research and development: to integrate taxi-hailing, private cars and ride-sharing in a single app.

Didi Kuaidi was also looking at expanding its business into Southeast Asia. According to Bloomberg, Uber (the bane of taxi drivers in South Africa and elsewhere) was attempting to raise $1bn in an attempt to win customers back in China.

Didi Kuaidi gets about three million single passenger rides a day across the country’s metropolises.

Surely the best way to compete with Uber (as shown by Didi Kuaidi) is to come up with a competing app and let the market decide.

They didn’t go about pulling people out of cars commandeered by Uber drivers. Surely that kind of violence is unsustainable.

The literal face and interface of markets continue to change, whichever world you inhabit, Third or First – scale, accessibility and legislation notwithstanding. The world is moving on, and we in South Africa continue to revert to methods lacking a deeper understanding of the playing field we are nowhere close to being on.