China Watch Blog

China Watch Blog started this blog as an experiment, with no aims to watch “China” or to watch “watch”, other than to purely “blog” and with no focus on making money from it or for China Watch Blog to become really famous. As a writer, yours truly wanted this blog as a platform to interact with other people with similar ideas. As people need business and economic data, China Watch Blog thought that it would be a good compliment to its parent transport logistics website – www.GCTL8.com – which specialises in transport logistics news.

But this blog has run into so many challenges after rising to be among the top China Watch bloggers. One wonders is it worth to go on?

China Watch Blog has received a study by AT Kearney entitled: “Are you ready? — China Transportation and Logistics Industry Outlook (2010-2015)”.

The whitepaper by the consulting company says 2010 marks the beginning of a new chapter of development of the People’s Republic of China after its 60th anniversary.  Read Special Report at www.GCTL8.com about the report. Sorry, only paid subscribers can have full access to the whitepaper.

The paper  reviews the transportation and logistics industry in China as a whole and its five segments, namely, express, road freight transportation, air freight transportation, contract logistics and international freight forwarding.

The whitepaper has analyzed the current market landscape; predicted future trends; and proposed constructive recommendations to transportation and logistics companies in China. Pretty interesting stuff.

Transport Logistics professionals should read it. Subscribe to GCTL8.com for only US$120 for a year, which means it costs only US$10 per month.

China Watch Blog was looking for criteria for good investment, and yours truly found this website – http://www.whatithinkabout.com/how-to-find-a-good-investment/ – which gives a couple of tips.

The author says “Clearly, the best alternative is to invest in either your own business, or someone else’s business that you understand. So the question becomes, “How exactly do we go about finding a company with a good business plan?”

Well, we can use the guidelines from my coming up with business ideas article. Afterall, if it’s a good business idea, and someone else is already doing it, might as well just join them! Here are the things to look for:

Fills a Need – Make sure that the business actually does something that someone will always want. For example, a business dedicated to bringing you the best housing, or a business that supplies people with books, is a solid foundation. A business that tells you to send them a dollar and pass the letter on is not. Any sort of business which doesn’t fill an actual need like multi level marketing (MLM) schemes are bound to fail. The more the need being filled matters, the more solid your business foundation. For example, people are fine without MLM books; people aren’t fine without food.

Is Run Well – Does the CEO sound like he sits on his ass all day and drinks beer? Is management in it to make a quick buck for themselves, at YOUR expense? Find out about the people running the business. Make sure that they actually care about filling the need in part 1. Just remember, if the business isn’t filling the need, it’ll disappear.

Has a High Barrier of Entry – The business should be hard to replicate. If it ends up making a lot of money and it’s easy to duplicate, pretty soon, there will be thousands of businesses just like it! People aren’t dumb – if they’re making their 8% in bonds and they see you’re making 200% with your business, they’re gonna come. This is where the branding of the company, and quality of the product becomes of paramount importance (see how much money is integrity worth?). If people trust the company, and the product is working just fine for them, it’ll be awfully hard to get them to switch. This is an interesting situation which I like to call the gap concept.

Is Underpriced – Let’s face it. We want to make money, so we’re looking for something cheap. Now, that doesn’t mean we’re ripping the other people off. It’s cheap for a reason. For example, if it’s a private business, the owner may need money to expand, or if it’s public, people may perceive the company to be very risky or unsuccessful for whatever reason. In that case, by putting your money in, you’re actually giving it your vote of confidence and making it slightly more expensive.

Of course, the more promising you think the business is, the more you can pay for it. Just keep in mind though that there’s potential everywhere while good results are hard to come by.

While there are probably other things to look out for, these 4 are by far the most important. If you just follow these 4 tips, you should be well on your way to finding a good, safe business to invest in!

China Watch Blog reports that Greater China Transport Logistics – GCTL8.com is now under going emergency maintenance – thanks to a massive upsurge of visitors activities at our website – causing our web host at ICDSoft.com to stop our services (basically we have outgrown our boots).

We have been told by ICDSoft.com that  GCTL8.com had an upsurge of hits on July 21 and 22 and they could not continue to support us and asked us to move to a new webhosting site.

According to ICDSoft.com, the top banner at our homepage – an ATE Advertisement which has been on display for almost two years – receive 2GB hits on July 21 & July 22. (tic). Yours truly is not an IT person and cannot understand why that Ad received so many hits on those two days. It remains a real mystery.

Anyhow, GCTL8.com has already found a new webhost and we are now migrating our service to the new server. China Watch Blog is being served by the new server already. Our new webhost is providing us five times more  bandwidth than that provided by ICDSoft, and our ability to send out bulk mail will also be increased tremendously. So the speed of downloading our GCTL Insights Magazine from our website will also be increased.

So, we will be able to provide all our readers better and more  efficient services in the next few days.

We realise that to be the world’s No. 1 Trilingual Transport Logistics website is very challenging, and we hope our readers worldwide will continue to give us the support we need. Alexa.com ranks our website at 344,185 todate, and that is no easy feat for a news web portal that started its services since 2005.

GCTL8.com apologises for any inconvenience caused, and we hope to return to FULL service in the next one or two days time.

GCTL Insights Magazine is now available in print version, in particular our March/April issue.
If you want the print edition, you can sign up for a year’s subscription. (A year’s subscription is for a total of 11 issues.)

Hong Kong readers can sign up for a year’s subscription at a rate of US$60, Asian readers at a rate of US$68, and USA, Europe and readers in other countries at a rate of US$78. (all prices quoted are for a year’s subscription including postage)

You will be able to see the icon for subscription of our GCTL Insights Magazine at our website – www.gctl8.com, which will be launched in the next couple of days.

GCTL8.com is abuzz with the news that GCTL Insights Magazine is going into print to meet customers demand. Yes, readers of the magazine want it in print so that they can put it into their brief cases and read it when they are in transit from one place to another, or while waiting for someone, or while having their breakfast. The type of articles found in GCTL Insights Magazine are very selective and  is intended to inform, entertainment and even challenge some executives’ minds. So, we will be publishing logistics challenges, and we will invite readers to submit solutions to overcome these challenges. Yes, there will be prizes for the winner, undoubtedly. Look out for our print edition of GCTL Insights Magazine.

China Watch Blog announces that GCTL8.com’s sister publication, GCTL Insights Magazine has just published its March/April issue, and urges readers to download it from the GCTL8.com website for FREE. This issue of the magazine has a cover story entitled “Pragmatism of Shippers – Hong Kong Shippers’ Council”. The article also highlights the fact that competitive pricing and meeting requirements are high on shippers’ list of needs. It also touches on the tussle between shipping lines imposing all kinds of rates on shippers, and what shippers are doing about it. Basically, making as much noise as possible so that their cries of injustice and unfairness by shipping lines is heard by some government authority that is willing to pull the carriers and force them to practice a more fair way of imposing surcharges. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be able to deter shipping lines, and more surcharges are being imposed from time to time. If you have any comments or suggestions, you are welcome to write to us.

With just 13 more days to go before the opening of the prestigious Shanghai World Expo 2010, everyone involved in this momentous event is working around the clock to get the show on the road. Transport logistics providers involved in this event are working like crazy to grease all the cogs in the wheel to make the event work. Read all about it in Editor’s Views in the latest edition of GCTL Insights Magazine – March/April issue.

The digital world can be bewildering to a person who is a non-technical person like this Editor. Greater China Transport Logistics (www.gctl8.com) probably has one the greatest number of hits monthly, averaging over 2 million hits monthly and 100,000 hits daily, but yet google analytics ranks our website as only Number 4 compared with other websites which are sure has far less visitors and far fewer hits than us monthly or daily. So, can we count on google analytics to do a fair job. No, websites have to do all kinds of wizardry and programming with their website to get a good ranking by google analytics. We just found out today after nearly five years operation that it is not an automatic process but far more complex to get a good ranking on google analytics. It is surprising that our daily news is not getting picked up by google analytics and does not compute in calculation of our ranking. Hope someone out there in cyberspace can give us a hand to uplift our ranking at google analytics by reflecting the actual quality of our website. All comments and suggestions on this topic are welcome.

Part II of Hong Kong Air Mail Centre Scandal is featured in February issue of GCTL Insights. Hong Kong Legislator Albert Chan lashes out at the Government for trying to cover up its mistakes related to the Hong Kong Air Mail Centre scandal. Millions of dollars were invested in the facility, but when it was completed, many of the equipment were left idle and the workers at the centre are still sorting many of the packages manually. Any simple Hong Kong person can understand that if millions of dollars of tax payers money had been invested in a facility to cut down manual labour, then the result should just be that. And when the results don’t show that, the tax payer has a right to know why nobody was punished for this scandal which was uncovered by the Director of Audit. Let’s hope this state of affairs is not repeated through ensuring less hanky panky takes place.