Zoe's Profile

Thank you Yuwa for addressing such an important problem. I found your suggestions quite insightful. The government definitely should seek for sustainable solutions to resolve the food crisis, as you suggested, they could plant drought-resistant crop seeds to make the yield less vulnerable and dependent on the water supply. I totally agree, and what I would think further is instead of asking the government and state-owned company ADMARC to take all the responsibilities of agriculture, especially when they are short of financial budget, can they play more powerful roles in solving this issue? for example, by mobilizing all the households in the country to start farming, teaching them the skills how to farm and incentivize them to grow the food by themselves. In such way, they could support themselves with food, reducing the burden of monitoring the supply chain of food in ADMARC. There is an old saying “Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime.” But this could be impractical. So would like to hear your thoughts further.

This is a problem China is facing as well, as you pointed out in the article. Among the three suggestions you made which are all important, my personal thought is banning all private cars is not quite practical, because 1) it will raise lots of complaint and potentially creates chaos in the short term; 2) car pollution is not the biggest source of air pollution, unqualified construction emission is. Therefore, what I would suggest Indian government to do are 1) develop public transportation system and encourage/incentivize people to use 2) incentivize people to use electric cars 3) develop clean technologies to replace the energies creating pollution and encourage companies to use 4) strictly regulate the pollution emission and implement significant penalties for violation. Hope the blue sky will one day come back!

Great article Patrick! To address your first question, I believe COMAC should leverage it’s state-owned background and mobilize the government to support its negotiation with FAA, considering China is and will be an important market for Boeing and Boeing does not want to lose China market. I believe a win-win situation could be achieved between COMAC/Chinese government with Boeing/US government.

However, to your second question, I do think COMAC should not only focusing on US market although it will give more reputation and branding effect to COMAC, while should also explore the enormous opportunities in emerging markets at the same time. US market is highly subjective to political environment in both sides. Therefore, instead of putting all eggs in one basket, COMAC should put more efforts in developing domestic markets and emerging markets overseas as priority.

Interesting article and great analysis, Oded! A question to me is whether a political policy intending to boost its economy is really helping the businesses in its economy. With such policy implemented, companies like Amazon might be hindered on its global expansion and spending more money on lobbying the government, thus in the end causing a loss for the society.

From Amazon’s perspective, although it might be challenging to triple the sales to meet the sales per square foot benchmark, I believe by building a warehouse in Mexico, it will bring financial benefits to its bottom-line. Meanwhile, future expansion to other central america counties by fully leveraging Mexico mega warehouse will contribute to Amazon’s topline and bottom line eventually.

This is great Darrin! Profitability and customer promise are usually trade-offs, especially in the short term!

I believe the giant beauty conglomerate L’Oréal is losing certain share to the small premium personal care brands boosted by digitization, such as Dollar Shave Club. To regain its share, as you wrote, L’Oréal must put consumer at the center of its supply chain strategy. Meanwhile, they must continue to invest on innovation and R&D. They must invest on building eCommerce as well – benefits include hugely valuable consumer data and higher margin. All these investments might hurt bottom-line in the short term, but it will bring sustainable growth in the long term, which L’Oréal must be able to convince its shareholders, bring them on board and ask for their patience. But this will be challenging undoubtedly.

This is interesting. I totally agree ATMs are under huge threat by the fast growing of digital payment. What I think NCR could do include, 1) I agree with you that they should shift their focus to other business segments, e.g. POS business, to build partnership with a technology company and gain competitive advantage; 2) for ATMs, I believe they should bring more value to consumers to attract them using ATMs. Cash withdraw might be replaced by cashless digital payment, while what NCR can do is to make more services available and automatic on ATMs which currently are only offered at the counter in the bank. In this way, they can re-utilize the widespread ATMs and continue growing business by upgrading the systems for clients.