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Part I: Speaker
[Rephrase 1]
Nature. Beauty. Gratitude.
[Speech, 9:47]
Source:TED http://www.ted.com/talks/louie_schwartzberg_nature_beauty_gratitude.html
Part II: Speed E-commerce bigger in China than United States
By David Wei, Special to CNN
[Time 2]
(CNN) -- Compared with their U.S. peers, Taobao versus eBay, JD.com versus Amazon, Suning vs. Walmart, the Chinese leading e-commerce players have a much shorter history. However, they will take a bigger e-commerce share from the overall retail space soon.
Unlike in the United States, most smaller cities in China have not been penetrated by organized retailers or consumer brands yet. This offers an opportunity for e-commerce to become the mainstream retail format for these cities.
Another reason is that the cost of commercial property in China went up significantly in the last decade. Thus, consumer brands and retail merchants are more encouraged to migrate online while in the United States, offline to online migration is mainly driven by labor cost and efficiency request. If not in 2013, no later than 2014, China's e-commerce will have a bigger gross merchandise volume than in the United States. Please be aware that China's total retail sales is still much smaller than the U.S., which further demonstrates that e-commerce's share in China will be much more significant.
2015, a breakthrough year for e-commerce in China
Why 2015? We need to understand the emerging cyber history in China. Almost all of China's leading Internet players' birthdays are in 1999, including Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Sina and Sohu, etc. In other words, there were no Internet applications until 2000.People born on or after 1980 were over 20 years old in by 2000. They started to get access to the Internet mostly after their campus lives. We call them a generation working in Internet.
Take a look at people born on or after 1985. They were teenagers in 2000 when the Internet was just getting started in China. This post-1985 generation is one that lives on the Internet, and started from social, gaming to almost everything. By 2015, this post-1985 generation is reaching their 30s and becoming the core consumer group for almost every category. They have already migrated to the virtual space and they are the mainstream consumption power in China.E-commerce will take such consumption power and make offline retail even weaker.
[348words]
[Time 3]
Different ecommerce business model is a MUST
Although I put Taobao.com versus eBay, JD.com vs. Amazon.com, Suning versus Walmart into respective peer group, they do not run the same business models and they don't even look similar anymore.
Why the e-commerce model needs to be so different, we need to answer this question from a consumer angle and a merchant angle.
As we mentioned above, Chinese Internet consumers are younger, and they're not mainstream yet. Most of them have never been served by organized, retailed or consumer brands yet.
Taobao.com can evolve from an online flea market to T-mall and become the shopping entry portal, while eBay finds itself having difficulty getting rid of its secondhand products from its auction site. From a merchant's point of view, there are millions of small but professional merchants in China, they will not just fill up Taobao.com but they will also flood into JD.com and Suning.com and become a major sales force in China.Any e-commerce platform's success depends on winning these millions of merchants and they will make the pure online retail model very difficult in China.
Behind these millions of merchants are hundreds of thousands of factories in China. This is why such phenomenon does not exist in the United States where you can hardly find any manufacturers. The monetization model in China for e-commerce is also very different.Advertising model is better accepted by millions of small merchants rather than transaction fee or listing fees.Even service powered by e-commerce needs a different model and will have a different future. When Groupon is under challenge in the United States, I believe that few Chinese survivors, like Meituan.com, from thousands of Chinese Groupons will have a brighter future than its original.
The brighter future is based on at least one-third of restaurants and other small and medium business changing hands every year and their ongoing marketing demand will offer companies like Meituan.com almost endless merchants list for promotion. On the other hand, the price sensitive consumers will be addicted to such service.
[341 words]
[Time 4]
Winning tips for foreign players in China
Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and Groupon, as part of a very long list of U.S. Internet and e-commerce giants, have tried different ways through set-up by themselves, acquisition, joint venture with local key players, none of them can claim any success in China yet.
Unlike other Internet applications, the e-commerce sector is least regulated and restricted by Chinese authorities in comparison to other Internet verticals. In my opinion, U.S. players cannot offer the real value to local consumers since their global technology and supply chain advantage cannot be leveraged in China.The cross-border management slows down the quick reaction required in this fast-moving market.
My advice for U.S. players is to humbly buy in minority shares in some emerging Chinese e-commerce players and focus on cross-border synergies, such as cross-border tourism, education or shopping behaviors, etc. These cross-border activities will be growing more rapidly and such synergy can really leverage U.S. peers' strength and offer real value to Chinese consumers.
[167 words]
Source: CNN
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/09/19/business/on-china-alibaba-e-commerce/index.html?iid=article_sidebar
Catwalk credentials
Why Burberry’s boss is a perfect fit for Apple
[Time 5]
AMONG stewards of big luxury brands Angela Ahrendts, the boss of Burberry, is probably the geekiest. Her main achievement has been to make the 150-year-old British company the most technologically savvy of its peers. Burberry plans to be the first luxury company that is “fully digital end to end”, she boasts. But what can she do for Apple, which on October 14th said it would poach her to run its retailing operations? Probably the opposite: revive a sense of style at a tech firm that has lately looked a bit dowdy.
Many purveyors of luxury fret about cheapening their wares by selling them online. Of the 100 biggest luxury brands just 56 have transactional websites, according to Exane BNP Paribas, an investment bank. Ms Ahrendts, an American who took over Burberry in 2006, had no such hangups. Not content with flogging calfskin trench coats online, she has deployed every platform, device or bit of software she could think of to romance customers and spark collaboration among employees and suppliers. iPad-wielding salespeople in Burberry stores can look up what customers have already bought, and suggest what might take their fancy next.
Ms Ahrendts should add pizzazz to Apple’s bricks-and-mortar shops, which are the most profitable in America measured by sales per square foot. But that seems a small job for a woman who last year was the highest-paid chief executive of a company in the FTSE 100 share index. At Apple, from next spring, she will merely be a senior vice-president.
So the odds are that her brief will go well beyond managing Apple’s stores. She can help it crack the Chinese market, where its iPhones are also-rans in the race against cheaper smartphones from Samsung and local manufacturers. Burberry earns more than a third of its revenue in Asia compared with Apple’s 28%.
[312 words]
[Time 6]
A bigger job will be to ready Apple for the coming fusion of fashion and technology. The most talked-about new devices are wearable. Google’s Glass smuggles a smartphone into a pair of spectacles. Samsung’s Galaxy Gear squeezes some smartphone functions into a wristwatch. Apple is also keen to surf the wearable wave. An iWatch, which Apple may launch next year, would pull it towards Ms Ahrendts’s home turf, since it would compete with fashionable timepieces like Burberry’s.
Apple has long been something of a fashion house. Its product launches are choreographed like catwalk shows. But its glamour has faded since the death of Steve Jobs, its founder, in 2011. His successor, Tim Cook, is striving to regain it. He recently hired Paul Deneve, the boss of Yves Saint Laurent, a French fashion house. Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s design guru, now oversees the look of software as well as hardware. Ms Ahrendts brings another eye for beauty, and a knack for seducing consumers.
[172 words]
Source ：Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21588087-why-burberrys-boss-perfect-fit-apple-catwalk-credentials
Part III: Obstacle
Europe’s other debt crisis
[Paraphrase 7]
It’s not just sovereign borrowing; there are too many zombie firms and over indebted households
Fifteen months ago, in July 2012, Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), promised to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency. Although the bond-buying scheme set up to fulfil that pledge has never been tested, yields on sovereign bonds have fallen. The euro mess has morphed from an acute crisis into a chronic one.
This week Mr Draghi launched what could become the second big turning-point in the euro saga: an inspection of the balance-sheets of the region’s 128 biggest banks which the ECB will supervise from late 2014. As part of its “asset-quality review”, ECB officials, along with outside experts, will start peering into the banks’ balance-sheets and impose common standards for loan quality. This process is supposed to find out which banks are viable now, which will need more capital and which should just be closed down.
Mr Draghi should be tough. The euro zone’s politicians, even in supposedly prudent Germany, have been reluctant to look too deeply into banks’ balance-sheets, let alone to force them to clean themselves up. There are certainly questions to be asked about all the government bonds that the banks have bought in recent years. But the main dodgy assets that have been swept under the European carpet are private: bad loans made to households and companies.
There are some nasty bugs under your carpet, Angela Europe is always thought of as having a sovereign-debt crisis, and it has. But the origins of the euro disaster lay less with government profligacy than with excessive private borrowing. True, Greece got into trouble because its government spent too much and collected too little in taxes. But elsewhere the bust followed a private-sector binge: mortgage debt in Ireland and Spain; corporate borrowing in Portugal and again in Spain. In all three countries household and corporate debt combined were way over 200% of GDP before the crisis, much higher than in America (175%) or even Britain (205%). Unfortunately, the euro zone has made less headway than other places in reducing this private-debt burden. Thanks to mortgage write-downs and faster growth, America’s households have unwound about two-thirds of the excess debt built up during the boom years. Most euro-zone countries have achieved far less private-sector “de-leveraging”, for three reasons. First, the fiscal austerity imposed on Europe’s peripheral economies deepened their recessions, which made it harder to reduce private debts. Second, weak banks have been reluctant to recognise, and hence make provisions for, non-performing loans. And third, European bankruptcy law is less debtor-friendly than America’s, and so tends to be less conducive to restructuring debt. In America many mortgages are “non-recourse”, meaning a borrower can hand back the keys and walk away; Europeans typically remain liable for unpaid mortgage debt. Corporate-bankruptcy procedures are often slow and costly: in Italy the process takes an average of seven years.
The corporate-debt problem is worst in Portugal, Spain and Italy, where the IMF says that 50%, 40% and 30% of debt, respectively, is owed by firms which cannot cover their interest payments out of pre-tax earnings. These firms are unable to invest or grow. They are zombie companies, much like those wafting through Japan in the 1990s.
The household-debt burden is especially heavy in Ireland and, surprisingly, the Netherlands—exceeding 100% of GDP in both places. Paying the mortgage strains household finances and crimps consumer spending. Whereas in America the share of income that the average household spends on servicing debt is now the lowest in decades, in Spain it is higher than during the boom years.
This time, they’re not Barack Obama’s If the euro zone’s recovery is to strengthen, this burden of private debt must be lightened. According to the IMF, private debt is a bigger drag on Europe’s growth than government debt. One prerequisite, which even Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, is beginning to accept, is less draconian austerity. It is virtually impossible for the private sector to reduce debt when governments try to slash their borrowing too. Another necessity is for banks to recognise, and write down, non-performing loans. That is where the ECB’s asset-quality review will be crucial. The central bank must make sure its assessment is both thorough and credible: Mr Draghi should stand firm against any political pressure to downplay the size of the bad-loan problem in order to minimise potential capital shortfalls. Equally, Europe’s politicians must be willing to provide the resources to recapitalise banks if necessary. Lastly, a more honest assessment of banks’ balance-sheets must translate into a willingness by the banks to sell or restructure mortgages and corporate loans. Mrs Merkel has been far tougher on Greece than on the German banks that lent the Greeks so much. Governments can create “bad banks” or specialist asset-management companies to manage and dispose of non-performing loans; they can help develop secondary markets in distressed debt with tax and regulatory breaks. And they can reform bankruptcy and tax laws to make it easier to restructure corporate and personal debts.
Most countries have already put a few of these reforms in place. Spain and Ireland have “bad banks”. Several countries have streamlined bankruptcy rules. Portugal has pioneered the use of out-of-court settlements. But much remains to be done. In Italy a mere €2 billion ($2.8 billion) of non-performing debts is sold each year, out of a stock of €122 billion. The Bundesbank is prone to lecturing the financial world about everything except the mess in Germany’s regional banks.
Sorting all this out will take time. The euro zone will not look like America, with a debtor-friendly legal system and a big market for distressed assets, overnight. But dealing with the private-debt trap should be a priority for Europe’s leaders. Better capitalised banks would be more able to lend; they would also make it easier to create a banking union. A continent littered with zombie firms and broke households will never prosper. It falls to Mr Draghi to start clearing up.
[1056words]
Source: Economist http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588366-its-not-just-sovereign-borrowing-there-are-too-many-zombie-firms-and-overindebted | 
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发表于 2013-11-6 23:38:12
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