Quote: (11-18-2011 03:11 AM)theoogabear Wrote:
how would you get into these fields? what would you be doing? would it be business? designing yachts?
You have to find a niche. It helps to speak the local language and have people you can trust on the ground. You ideally will have spent time in this place and have built a solid professional and social network that you can rely on in times of need.
This is why I focus so strongly on strategically building networks. It may seem cold, calculating, and douchey - but if you plan on doing international business this is critical. You will fail without trusted partners and connections. You're going to go abroad and make friends anyway. You're going to go abroad and bang chicks anyway. Why not make friends with powerful people?
People tend to see the two as mutually exclusive - making friends and making connections - I suggest you try to accomplish both simultaneously.
Designing yachts can be done anywhere. You wouldn't go to a place like Vietnam or China to design yachts, that kind of work can be done anywhere. Unless by "design" you meant "construct", which are two entirely different things. Luxury boats are generally built in Northern Europe, although Korea is rapidly taking over in this field.
In the context of this thread, you are looking at Asia to sell expensive items to newly rich Asian consumers. Typically the trend has been the opposite - selling cheap Asian-made products to western countries - but that trend is reversing.
Watch these BBC documentaries and pay particular attention to the luxury goods companies. They come in a range of fields. In fact, many of the industries I mentioned earlier in this thread are included here: luxury watches, cosmetics, yachts.....some succeed and some fail. You'll get an in depth look at how this kind of thing works. There is no clear cut way, you have to forge a path.
VIETNAM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igu5G8rle3Q
Watch the yacht story carefully. I loved watching this. Pay attention to the private school and the reasons they failed - poor communication between joint venture partners. Frankly those guys are idiots, as far as business goes. How can you drop 85K British Pounds and not have your objectives clearly hammered out with your JV partner? Lunacy.
Watch the story of the magazine guy. His persistence pays off, despite his frustration in never being able to get a clear answer from his potential distributors. Although you will have to invest much more time up front to gain trust from an Asian businessperson, once they trust you, you have them for life.
I personally don't like that way of doing business. It's inefficient and not enforceable in a court of law. It's also the reason why I don't do business with friends or family, because I can't fire them or, if they compete with me, run them out of business.
You have to be prepared to run your competitors out of business and watch them starve on the street.
From all these videos, you will learn much more from the failures than from the successes. The successes are sometimes pure luck and could have failed under different circumstances or stakeholders.
BRAZIL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8iHhYlJ6Xw
Watch the cosmetics story here. Again, I love it and very well done. Great niche in cosmetics for dark skinned women, something that has a large target market in Brazil (44 million, size of S. Korea) and will only increase. Brazil is also culturally inclined to use products of this ort.
INDIA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDVAmeh5S...re=related
Watch the story of the luxury watches. They do poor market research, and make stupid assumptions that the value that these watches hold in the UK will hold value in the eyes of Indian consumers. They are a bit arrogant, or at least incompetent, in making that assumption.
I am not particularly impressed by any of the India ones. Admittedly, I think doing business in India would be a nightmare. In terms of red tape and infrastructure, it makes China look like Singapore. If Indians in India are anything like Indian immigrant businessmen in New York, they will make business deals as complicated, drawn out, and frustrating as humanly possible.
CHINA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_n4pTMJLnE
This is a different series that was not done by the BBC, but basically the same theme. None of these are luxury goods, but it is very relevant in a different way: all of the aforementioned BBC documentaries deal more with multinationals breaking into emerging markets, whereas all of the featured people in "Brits Get Rich in China" are actually entrepreneneurs and the owners of their own enterprises.
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Watch carefully and see the reasons why the failures failed.
Arrogance and decision-making based on flawed assumptions overwhelmingly are the reasons why they fail. Examples - watch makers going to India, old British guy selling air conditioning units in China through a JV (I'm sure he has been ripped off and gone broke).
In contrast, the yachts guys and the kitchenware supplier (Vance Miller) did very well. The yacht guys did their due diligence, understood that they needed a reliable joint venture partner, and then put their trust in the hands of a trusted connection. For them it worked - although it would not work for everyone. I think they got particularly lucky, and you can see at the end that the Vietnamese partners tried to re-neg on the price that they had previously agreed upon.
This commonly happens in Asian negotiations - the idea of contract law is relatively new in Asia and Asians like to think that an agreement, once made, is flexible and can be changed at whim. This is appalling to a western businessman, but something we have to comprehend, accept, and navigate when operating in emerging markets. Alternatively, your Asian counterpart is expecting that, as things change in the market, you will also suggest changes to the agreement. It can be beneficial to you as well.
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