A few days after my attendance at the US-China Business Council luncheon in Washington, I traveled to Ireland where, on February 19, Prime Minister Enda Kenny (“Taoiseach” is his title in Ireland) hosted a dinner in Dublin Castle to honor the visit of Vice-President Xi Jinping. I was privileged to...
There is an interesting and very topical debate going on on the viability of China's system of "state capitalism". Intelligence Squared will be hosting a debate entitled, "China Does Capitalism Better Than America", where Orville Schell and Peter Schiff will be arguing "For" and Ian Bremmer and Minxin Pei will...
On February 15th, 2012, Mr. Michael De Clercq, Founder and CEO of China Performance Group, a U.S. and China based company specializing in China sourcing advisory services since 1978, was among the nearly 600 persons invited to the luncheon in honor of the soon to be President of the PRC,...
On January 1, the EU extended its ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) to the aviation sector. It requires all airlines transiting or operating from or to a European airport to buy pollution permits in accordance to their actual level of pollution. The ETS is a crucial tool for the EU to...
It was exciting for me to attend the luncheon in honor of Xi Jinping in Washington on Wednesday. It was an opportunity to meet impressive people and reconnect with old friends. Carolyn Brehm, for example, whom I had met in China in the late seventies as a trail-blazing China expert...
There was an article we came across not too long ago on the popular China Law Blog called “Buying a Chinese Company? Why China Deals DON’T Get Done.” This was a great write up on, as the title suggests, why generally as a foreign company you DO NOT want to...
Qualifying your supplier and maintaining steady and regular audits of factories that you cooperate with is essential for China sourcing. Often buyers will assume that once a relationship with a factory has been firmly established, the hard part of the China buying process is over. However, most will find that...
One of the most important factors with international purchasing is how to reduce costs, specifically shipping costs. When an order is less than a full container, an effective and relatively easy way to accomplish this is through LCL consolidation, which is the consolidation of orders that are “Less-than Container Load”....
