NextBillion - A WDI Publication

Selling China’s cars to the world: An interview with Chery’s CEO

Few people took Chery Automobile seriously when it was established, a little more than a decade ago, in the city of Wuhu, in Anhui Province, China. Chery was a newcomer in a small area that had little tradition of manufacturing and was far from the country?s traditional centers of auto production, in Beijing, Changchun, Shanghai, and Wuhan. When the start-up failed to find buyers for a motor engine it had developed, there was little choice but to manufacture a car of its own so that the engin...

Source

McKinsey Quarterly (link opens in a new window)

Vodafone rules out bidding for MTN in wake of Bharti offer

Vodafone yesterday insisted that it had no plans to make a bid for MTN, a leading mobile phone operator in Africa and the Middle East. The UK group last week reviewed the case for making a bid for MTN after Bharti Airtel, India’s largest wireless operator, made an informal offer for a controlling stake in the Johannesburg-listed company. Bharti’s indicative offer was for 51 per cent of MTN’s equity at R160 per share. That valued MTN’s entire equity at...

Source

Financial Times (link opens in a new window)

Region

Sub-Saharan Africa

Text Messages Empower Poor Farmers

The BBC’s Damian Grammaticas sees how poor Indian farmers are using business text messages to get better prices for their goods. --- At the Khandova temple in Jhejuri it’s festival time. The harvest is just in and it’s time to celebrate. Thousands of farmers, dressed in white, come from across Maharashtra state to climb the steep hill up to the temple. With them are their wives wrapped in brightly coloured saris and children too. ...

Source

BBC News (link opens in a new window)

Global Poverty: More Big Business is Not the Solution

By most accounts, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is genuinely passionate about reducing global poverty. But he is not willing to challenge the structures of the global economy that generate poverty, or the corporations that build, benefit from and maintain those structures. Nor, apparently, is he immune to gimmicky notions of corporate leadership to support development, or the lure of high-profile summits to shed light on new plans to do -- very little. Thus, ...

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Huffington Post (link opens in a new window)

Africa: Toll-Free Mobile Service to Give Rural Africa Access to Medics

A toll-free mobile service being launched in selected remote areas in Africa promises to save lives by connecting people with emergency medical cases to health personnel. Under the initiative launched in Nairobi on Wednesday, health workers will also be trained through mobile phone sessions on day to day skills like collecting and sharing basic household health information. Telecommunication equipment provider Ericsson and mobile phone service provider Zain have adopted ...

Source

AllAfrica.com (link opens in a new window)

Indonesian operators’ call to lure customers has only just begun

A blizzard of advertisements for Indonesia’s 11 mobile operators has covered the country, competing for the lowest prices, best call quality and cheapest deals. So begins what is expected to be a major boom in mobile subscriptions and telecom revenue. The national regulator slashed internet work connection charges by up to 40 per cent last month and these savings have largely been passed on to users. The authorities are pushing operators to share towers, which will reduc...

Source

Financial Times (link opens in a new window)

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report on Women and Entrepreneurship Released

WELLESLEY, Mass., May 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Women’s entrepreneurship matters -- women are creating and running businesses around the world, contributing to economies that represent more than 70% of the world’s population and 93% of global GDP (2007). Women’s entrepreneurship is a key contributor to economic growth in low/middle income countries, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean according to The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2007 Report on ...

Source

KRON 4 (link opens in a new window)

Rebooting the Indian green revolution

Ajit Singh, a farmer in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, had never seen a computer until four years ago when ITC, the Indian agribusiness-to-hotels conglomerate, installed a PC in his village, Kurthia. Now the thin 47-year-old farmer visits the ITC station, known as an e-choupal after the Hindi term for gathering place, every day for online access to news-papers, crop prices, weather forecasts and farming techniques. As ITC’s village manager...

Source

Financial Times (link opens in a new window)