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Welcome to China’s “Wild West” of Capitalism
Not long ago, Tsoi Chun Bun made potato chips. Now he designs and sells millions of mobile phones a year. He is one of hundreds of young entrepreneurs seeking overnight fortunes in Shenzhen Inc. — the Wild West of the mobile-phone industry. Phones made and designed by these Chinese vendors will account for about a third of the 1.1 billion cell phones that will be sold around the world this year.... ...
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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MBAs Turn to Social Enterprise
By developing a low-cost structure and specialising in maternity care, LifeSpring Hospitals, a fast-growing private healthcare chain in India, can charge Rs2,000 ($43, €29, £26) for a normal delivery, a cost that runs to Rs12,000 in mainstream Indian private hospitals. Learning how to deliver services to the world’s poorest consumers is not what MBA students aspired to. But with a new wave of students looking to use their business skills to tackle global problems, stories of so...
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Peddling Trash: Waste Management and Income Generation
Daily quantities are sold for daily needs in Nairobi’s ever-growing slums. Called the kidogo economy, Swahili for ’little’, laundry detergent, margarine and anything else manufacturers haven’t packaged in small boxes are divided and resold in tiny affordable sachets. In this context of severe urban poverty, micro-enterprise isn’t a buzz word. It’s a lifestyle. So it’s appropriate that a solid waste management program ...
- Categories
- Finance
- Tags
- waste
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The Internet Address Goes Global – with Local Languages
Bill Radke: The Internet address goes global. The company that acts as the world’s clearinghouse for Internet domains is a California-based non-profit called ICANN. Reporter Kurt Achin says ICANN is about to help the Web speak the local language around the world. Kurt Achin: Up until now, Internet users have had to type out web page URLs using the Roman alphabet. But on Friday, ICANN’s board -- meeting here in Se...
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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At the BoP, Companies First Need to Create the Market
Around the world, four billion people live in poverty. And Western companies are struggling to turn them into customers. For the past decade, business visionaries have argued that these people, dubbed the Base of the Pyramid, make up an enormous, untapped market. Some of the world’s biggest, savviest corporations have aimed to address their basic needs—by selling them everything from clean water to electricity. But, time and again, the initiatives have quietly ...
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BoP Guru Named World’s Top Business Thinker
Few management thinkers have the ability to come up with one winning idea after another. C.K. Prahalad is a rare exception. He has the remarkable ability to be ahead of the times. Look at any of his key ideas — be it core competence, co-creation or the bottom of the pyramid — Prahalad’s influence on the study and practise of management has been immense. It is no wonder then that for the second time in a row, the Indian-born management guru has earned the distincti...
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Western Union Tapping the Fortune
Money transfer company Western Union believes in tapping fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. The company is tying up with microfinance institutions (MFIs) and e-governance service providers to facilitate financial inclusion. This marks a shift in its India game plan, to offer money transfer services through MFIs besides its current portfolio of India Post network, banks, retail and finance agents. The Nasdaq-listed company has tied up with e-governance and I...
- Region
- South Asia
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Indian Firms Shift Focus to the Poor
Indian companies, long dependent on hand-me-down technology from developed nations, are becoming cutting-edge innovators as they target one of the world’s last untapped markets: the poor. India’s many engineers, whose best-known role is to help Western companies expand or cut costs, are now turning their attention to the purchasing potential of the nation’s own 1.1-billion population. The trend that surfaced when Tata Motors’ tiny $2,200 car, the Nano, hi...
- Region
- South Asia
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