China Digital Tech Podcast: Recent Episodes
Paul Lin
China’s consumer market is arguably the most competitive on the planet. With the proximity of a rising affluent middle class, massive market scale, manufacturing base, and abundant engineering talent, it is hard to match China’s speed for prototyping new products and new business models to match changing consumer trends.
As the rest of the world from the US, Europe, to emerging markets such as India, Indonesia, and Brazil now looks to Chinese tech companies for inspiration, foreign brands operating here need to bring their “A” game to adapt to this China speed and compete.
The China Digital Tech Podcast is here to help tell the story of these great companies, the trends we are seeing locally in the market, and the lessons brands can learn from experts living and working here on the ground.
We talk with Alex Li, CEO of KAWO – an enterprise SaaS social media management platform backed by Sequoia China – about how a company originally focusing on foreign brands in China can broaden to help domestic brands.Alex discusses the challenges of raising funding in the current environment, and the never-ending quest to hire and retain talented people that fit the company’s DNA.
You've heard a lot about the new data rules in China. But what are big foreign brands actually doing to comply? With so much at stake for their brand image and so many new and unclear rules to comply with, Michel shares with us the approaches his clients are taking on the ground.
If you live in China, you’ve surely seen NIU electric scooters everywhere, But fewer people know the fantastic success of their international expansion, a shining example for other Chinese-based companies looking to expand abroad.
Joe Constanty, Director of International at NIU walks us through how NIU did it, what some of their biggest challenges have been, and how they plan to be part of the global revolution in EV-powered urban mobility solutions.
We talk with Momo Estrella, Head of Digital Design at IKEA China. Momo was previously Senior Design Lead at IDEO in Shanghai.
We talk with the often-quoted authority on KOL marketing in China, Elijah Whaley, about how brands work with KOLs (or influencers) here.
Art Dicker in a previous Ganbei episode, talks with Paul Lin on how brands approach digital marketing in China.