Hong Kong

"In 1980, when Deng Xiaoping christened Shenzhen a “special economic zone,” the city had little to recommend it other than its location directly abutting British-ruled Hong Kong. Deng wagered that success in Shenzhen could tear down the socialist strictures on China’s economy that the rest of the leadership had been hesitating to dismantle. He lavished the city with supportive policies and penned editorials to beckon the ambitious to move there."

"The East India Company's food ship Lord Amherst had docked at Shanghai in 1832 with members of a trade mission eager to buy tea and silk in exchange for their own piece-goods and opium. They were given a cold reception by officials acting on imperial orders. The opium clippers continued to establish smuggling bases at Lintin Island, off Canton, and other strategic centres like Hong Kong. The authorities had finally raided warehouses on Lintin and boarded several armed junks waiting offshore to take the drug in. They seized and burned twenty thousand chests worth upwards of £2 million. (Some outraged shippers valued their losses as high as £5 million.) It was the long-expected, and not unwelcome, signal for British warships to come to the aid of all honest merchants in the sacred name of free trade. They demolished the weak Chinese forces in an operation which would pay the plumpest of dividends for a full century."

"Elias made Shanghai his personal base in 1850. Hong Kong seemed to him too dependent on slow mails and supercargoes of small clippers to handle a heavier volume of China trade. Already he saw lively potentialities beyond opium which was profitable but risky, and always strongly competitive. He therefore began to import metals, muslins and cotton while smoothly expanding the spice trade with the Indies, a lucrative sideline of the family business since their earliest years in Bombay. Moreover, the cold northern provinces offered a vast untapped market for the woollen yarns which his father was buying up in bulk."

"After only ten years of independent trading, Elias and his sons felt equipped, both psychologically and financially, to give a lead to the more complacent parent firm. Cotton manufacture was an obvious outlet, but Sassoon caution made Elias hesitate until a Parsee had again shown the way. J. N. Tata recovered from his misadventures with Premchand Roychand and indirectly profited by his experiences in the false boom. During the ill-starred attempt to open an Indian Bank in England, he hurried to Lancashire to develop the brokerage side of their business. He interested himself in machinery and the workings of the Manchester Cotton Exchange. On his return, he thought much about the possibilities of manufacturing cotton locally instead of relying on Lancashire's piecegoods. Fourteen mills were now operating in Bombay with about half a million spindles, but many more had closed down through lack of money or bad management. To rebuild his capital Tata had first gone to Hong Kong, exchanging silk goods for the opium his brother shipped out from Bombay. Profits were satisfactory, but he saw little chance of breaking either the Sassoons' hold on this two-way traffic or the handsome rebates and discounts which they and others enjoyed in the freight market. He returned to India in 1869, investing his limited funds in a disused oil-pressing plant which he rapidly converted into a small cotton mill. The output was insignificant and not of good quality, but he familiarized himself with machinery and day-to-day administration. He recovered his whole outlay in two years and sold the plant at a respectable profit."

"Under these circumstances, my parents decided to send me overseas. My third uncle, Mr. Zhang Sihou, was then a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and he chose for me to apply to Harvard University. Why choose Harvard? First, Harvard is a world-famous institution; second, Harvard is in Boston, and my third uncle could look after me nearby. But Boston also had another world-famous school, one that specialized in science and engineering: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Why, after my father had clearly told my third uncle that I was going to study science and engineering, did my third uncle still not choose MIT for me? About this, I later asked my third uncle. He smiled and said, “The you I knew was the you at Nankai in Chongqing, when you loved the humanities. Later I heard you wanted to study business. It wasn’t until you got to Hong Kong that I heard you wanted to study science and engineering. I thought you should have time to gradually establish your own interests. Rather than rush you into the very specialized MIT, it would be better to let you have a buffer period at Harvard. Besides, Harvard’s science and engineering are also top-notch—it’s just not as specialized as MIT.”"

"Before I turned eighteen, I had already fled disaster three times, lived in six cities (Ningbo, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Chongqing, Shanghai), and changed schools ten times. I had experienced gunfire (Hong Kong) and bombings (Guangzhou, Chongqing), and crossed battle lines (from Shanghai to Chongqing). I had a carefree childhood (Hong Kong), and also tasted the impassioned life of a middle school student during the War of Resistance (Chongqing); still more, I tasted the sorrow of leaving home and country, not knowing when I would return (from Hong Kong to the United States)."

"Blevins couldn’t be at every meeting, so he taught his subordinates the values he’d picked up working at a used-car lot as a teenager. When the procurement team would meet in Hong Kong or Shenzhen, each would be given the same amount of currency, then sent off to the local market for a set time. Whoever came back with the most silk ties was the winner. This game would be played over and over again, inculcating a sense of intense competition."

"Blevins had already been a spectacular negotiator, and as Apple grew, he developed further ways to tilt the field. He’d organize suppliers into adjacent hotel rooms, then travel from one to the next, pushing prices lower and subtly indicating that some rival had just made a better offer. Blevins wouldn’t let the suppliers order food or leave the rooms, and depending on the situation, he’d toy with the temperature. If it was the kind of hot and humid summer in Hong Kong when nobody would think to have brought a jacket, Blevins would crank up the air-conditioning in the hotel room, to the point where only the Apple team was appropriately dressed. “Then they would go all night till they made them cave,” one colleague says. Apple’s terms could be hard to say no to. In the 2010s, Apple would often ramp a product from hundreds of thousands of units to the tens of millions. Margins might be risibly low, but a supplier could become rich off the volumes."

"In 1980, Shenzhen was a fishing village of fewer than 70,000 people. But as a special economic zone just across the harbor from Hong Kong, Shenzhen and the area around it underwent a metamorphosis. “By the late 1980s, the entire 104-mile route from Hong Kong to Guangzhou was lined on both sides with factories,” according to the late Ezra Vogel, a Harvard scholar and the biographer of Deng Xiaoping. By 1990 the city of Shenzhen had a population of 1.7 million; in the early 2000s, it had grown to around 7 million. In just twenty-five years, Shenzhen’s population grew a hundredfold."

"Terry Gou’s bet exemplified his tenacity, ambition, and daring disposition. What made him such a good competitor was his ability to predict his clients’ needs before his clients did. By the time Apple realized it needed to double production of some hit product, Foxconn would’ve already increased capacity by expanding its factory and moving the precision machinery into place. But more than that, the bet demonstrated Gou’s political savvy. When the global financial crisis hit, big investors and entrepreneurs based in Taiwan and Hong Kong retreated from China, a natural response, as demand for goods from North America and Europe sputtered. Gou, by contrast, was willing to invest, and he did so in ways that aligned his political interests with Beijing’s."

"Amid the telecom industry’s “winter”, Ren Zhengfei continued with determination. He firmly believed “spring” would certainly arrive and waited optimistically in the chill. After eight years of development, Huawei’s 3G bore fruit. At the end of 2003, it successfully launched the country’s first WCDMA/GSM dual-mode phone. In February 2004, it introduced China’s first WCDMA phone at the Cannes exhibition in France. On November 15, 2004, Huawei officially launched three mature commercial WCDMA terminals in Hong Kong, becoming one of the few global suppliers offering end-to-end 3G solutions. By early 2005, Huawei had showcased a series of 3G terminals at the Cannes and Germany’s CeBit exhibitions, drawing increasing attention to its 3G offerings."

""In those days, the two brothers moved to Hong Kong... established Xichanglong Company at 202 Queen's Road Central. My great-grandfather and grand-uncle often traveled between Hong Kong and home," and the company's main business was "importing blue cotton from the British, selling it to Hong Kong residents." The term "blue cotton" refers to "indigo denim," a primary fabric used by the general public for making clothes (Li Dehui, 1995: 25), in considerable quantity."

"Therefore, while exploring how inland immigrants contributed to Hong Kong’s social and economic development, attention is also on the "overseas returning Chinese," even though fewer in number, they contributed significantly. Due to their many years living in the western world, gaining western perspective and capital, upon settling in Hong Kong, they effectively introduced (or absorbed) Western management models, boosting local enterprises' overall competitiveness. Their roots and experience in the West also positioned them perfectly as intermediaries expanding overseas trade, playing a crucial role in Hong Kong's emergence as a global business hub."

"eyeglasses. It had decided to diversify on several fronts to escape from a very competitive market. On one hand, it was betting on the contact lens business, to which it had added a division for hearing aids and one for hair loss solutions: sectors that had no synergy with the optics industry, a choice that fragmented commitments and investments making its glasses less competitive. It no longer had true direct control over the making of its products, which had been outsourced: the frames and semi-finished products were produced in Ireland and San Antonio. The lenses, on the other hand, were made in Hong Kong. Finally, the glasses were assembled again in Texas, in a factory with a very high turnover of workers, without specialized operators, far from the managers who stayed at the headquarters."

"Knoetze first attended a congress on small business in Berlin, where he built up valuable contacts from Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea. After visiting each of these countries as well as Singapore and Tokyo in Japan, he returned with a wealth of information about the flourishing small businesses of the Far East."

"In his lecture at the University of Pretoria, he stated that it was necessary to send a ‘young man … with a Polaroid camera’ to places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Florence and Barcelona to photograph and report on what people in small businesses were doing."

"The first was, ‘If you could be anyone in the world who would it be?’ Early on Gibbs had assumed that people would probably prefer to be soccer stars, Brigitte Bardot, billionaires or someone glamorous. To his surprise, everyone he asked, after a little thought, preferred to remain themselves. He has been equally amazed by the responses to his second question: ‘If you could be any age, what would it be?’ Again, he’d assumed that older people would want to be younger, but very few did. Around 90 per cent of the people he asked were happy where they were and didn’t really want to go back. The third question he found most interesting: ‘What would you do if your aunt died and left you a lot of money?’ Invariably people said they’d pay off mortgages, buy certain things, travel a bit, but virtually no one told him that they’d radically alter their lives if they had access to money. The most dramatic example of this was a young English girl that Gibbs had started talking to in a Hong Kong bar. She’d told him her life story, how she’d been a chorus dancer in London, then had spent a few years working on boats in the Caribbean and was now working her way around the world, and how what she really wanted was to get back on to the stage. When Gibbs asked her what she’d do if her auntie died and left her £200,000, she said she would have a party with her best mates until it was gone. She then laughed and said, ‘Doesn’t that make a fool of what I’ve told you.’ Gibbs observes: *I find it amazing that through our genes nature makes nearly everyone content to be who they are, whatever their age and circumstances.*"