.ASIA Cyber Land Rush Starts Feb. 20
I got fair warning from my URL vendor of choice, dotster, that the .asia cyber land rush begins this week, on Feb. 20. I found it especially timely and interesting, having just attended a “Doing Business in China” breakfast on Friday. I was pretty impressed by the speakers and the opportunity…
China: The Law of Large Numbers
In Oregon, China is our 2nd largest export market (Canada is number one). And exports to China have grown at a 9x rate in the northwest (vs. 5x in the US as a whole). In fact, in 2006 Oregon’s exports to China grew 76% over 2005.
I’m guilty (as most who haven’t been there) of thinking of China in some pretty antiquated terms - streets teeming with bicycles, lots of street markets, etc. Governor Gary Locke, a Chinese-American and former governor of Washington state (my home state, voted the “most digital state government” under his reign), described the reality of China today:
- There are so many cars they’ve built eight-lane aerial freeways in most major cities to move people
- Tall buildings abound. One Hyatt Hotel there is 100+ stories high, with the lobby on the 60th floor… and I have always been irritated at the 3rd floor lobby at the Marriott Marquis in NY.
- There are 550M cell phone subscribers today; and predicted to be 800M (out of 1.3B people) in two years.
- Factories in China are much more modern than those in the US.
Last year, according to Alan Homer, Special US Envoy to China, the US and China accounted for almost 50% of all economic growth. While there are highly charged issues in China (16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China, and 90% of the rivers there are polluted); the US and China are taking an approach of “goodwill and economic understanding” to our discussions, called the Strategic Economic Dialogue, or SED.
(sed.asia… not a bad URL to reserve…)
According to Locke, engineering, health and safety issues and expertise in the environment are key issues the Chinese are looking to solve. And they’re gearing up to do so themselves, that’s for sure. Even though 60% of the people are living in what we would call primitive conditions, Chinese protectionism is growing, and parents are highly focused on the education of their children.
One of the most shocking stats I heard in the whole presentation:
Intel hosts an international science and technology fair for high school students each year. Last year in the US, 65,000 students participated. In China (with only 4x the population of the US) more than 6,000,000 students participated. That’s Six Million vs. Sixty Thousand, folks.
So smart businesses should be thinking about their .asia cyber strategies… and looking hard at the opportunity that China might hold.
