China :: Business :: Deals

As promised a departure from our recent focus on fashion and luxury in China. I did a Q/A with the always insightful, always entertaining and fantastic writer Benjamin Shobert of the Asia Healthcare Blog yesterday. Here is the article he published. Ben Shobert: You make reference to what you call Chinas policy of health through wealth? Can you explain where that comes from and what it means to companies looking at China as an opportunity for their healthcare business? Michael Zakkour: That phrase came from my extensive and repeated readings of the Chinese governments 12th five-year plan. I tried to formulate in my mind what the commonalities across sectors were as the country pursues growth. What I saw was an admission by China that to sustain growth and continue to move in the right direction they had to admit that the country has some unhealthy things happening. To address this, they see that they need to approach the health of the people, the country and the environmen...

DoNews, 10/17/11 Jack Ma, chairman of Chinese e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba Group, today announced newly revised rules for B2C e-commerce platform Taobao Mall. Merchants who belonged to the platform prior to October 10 and have ranking in the top 90% in terms of customer service (a customer satisfaction score no lower than 4.6 points) can pay fees under the old rules from January 1 to September 30, 2012 on a monthly basis, after which they will pay fees under the new rules. New merchants will pay under the old rules until January 1, when they will begin paying under the new fee structure. Alibaba Group will invest an additional RMB 1 bln in the consumer protection fund and cut merchants' 2012 consumer protection deposits in half. Alibaba Group will also provide RMB 500 mln to guarantee loans to small merchants, and will also invest RMB 300 mln towards marketing and improvements to its technology service platform. The bottom 10% in terms of customer satisfaction, however, wi...