Author Results for Sky Canaves

Swire’s Property IPO – Less If Than When

One month has passed since Swire Pacific pulled the plug on its property IPO. While there hasn’t been any update from the company as to the fate of the listing, it is still very likely that the IPO will be relaunched.

It’s just a matter of timing.

With plenty of market volatility, revival in the near term, or before the listing approval expires in October, is unlikely. The euro-zone jitters, which derailed the listing in the first place, persist. A firm as sure-footed as Swire Pacific would be unlikely to want to push it through quickly, risking the embarrassment a failed second attempt might bring.

Stanley Lubman: China’s Lawyers Muzzled

Stanley Lubman, a long-time specialist on Chinese law, teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and is the author of “Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao,” (Stanford University Press, 1999).

The Chinese government’s heightened determination to discourage and intimidate lawyers from representing clients in cases deemed “sensitive,” or for speaking out on violations of human rights, has been on harsh display in recent weeks. The month of May was marked by several examples of tactics that the central and local governments have employed or condoned in recent years to pressure lawyers. Among these tactics have been abductions and beatings of lawyers, detention by police, pressure on law firms to stop taking cases, and permanent disbarment (For previous examples, see the 2009 annual report of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, available here as a PDF.)

Two lawyers who represented a Falun Gong practitioner were recently disbarred for life for allegedly “disrupting courtroom order and interfering with regular litigation process” in the trial of their client. According to an AP report, cited here, on May 7 the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Justice posted separate notices on its website announcing that lawyers Tang Jitian and Liu Wei had lost their licenses to practice. “The notices said the pair had ‘disobeyed court personnel and disrupted order in the courtroom’ during an April 2009 trial at the Luzhou Municipal Intermediate People’s Court in Sichuan province. The lawyers say they were illegally videotaped during the trial, interrupted repeatedly by the judge and ordered out of the courtroom by unidentified men. “Tang and Liu eventually walked out of the courtroom after they objected to being videotaped — which is illegal in Chinese courtrooms — and the court descended into chaos.” The lawyers’ refutation of the disruption charge is available here.

Geithner in Translation: Gao Yiran Or Gai Te Na?

As we have said before on China Real Time Report: The U.S. Treasury secretary, in Beijing for the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, has a history in China.

Geithner studied Mandarin for two summers in the early 1980s at Peking University. Perhaps some of the Beijing officials at the summit will remember his Chinese name from his student days, Gao Yiran, or 高逸然. Gao sounds similar to the principal syllable in his surname and Yiran means “elegant” and “graceful.”

Basketball Diplomacy: Geithner Shoots Hoops in Beijing

Amid the big U.S-China issues of the day—rising tensions over North Korea, the Strategic and Economic Dialogue between the two countries this week in Beijing — U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took some time out Sunday for a half-court game of four-on-four with some students from a high school affiliated with Renmin University in the Chinese capital. Clad in rolled-up shirtsleeves, slacks and sneakers, Geithner faced some keen competition on the court, as seen in the five-minute video clip (after the jump), via Youku.

Never the Bride? Everbright Bank’s Long IPO Quest

If China Everbright Bank Co. manages to launch its IPO before the end of the June, the bank’s executives will have good reason to crack open the champagne – although the bubbles will probably be flat and the ice long since melted.

Everbright first started moving toward an IPO more than 10 years ago in hope of joining Pudong Development Bank and Shenzhen Development Bank Ltd among the first wave of Chinese banks to list.

Wi-Fi IPhone May Make It to Chinese Market

Apple’s belated launch of the iPhone in China last year was dampened for many users by the discovery that the handset did not have Wi-Fi capabilities, but a new Wi-Fi-enabled Chinese iPhone may finally be on the horizon, according to a Chinese government testing body.

The State Radio Monitoring Center, which handles radio frequency testing for handsets released in China, posted an approval notice for a handset by Apple Inc. with wireless Internet capabilities. The listing, dated April 26, doesn’t provide enough information to tell whether the device is an iPhone 3GS or a newer model, but says the device includes China’s homegrown wireless standard, WAPI.

BCG’s David Michael on China’s Digital Revolution

A new report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) on the impact of digital technology in China looks into the rapid rise of the Internet and how its use varies from other major markets. Among the findings: Chinese Internet users already spend more time online than Americans and they prefer to focus on entertainment and communications to a greater extent than users in other countries (for the full report, see here). We spoke with David Michael, a senior partner in BCG’s Beijing office and lead author of the report, for more insights into China’s digital consumption trends.

–You mention in the report that many consumer-oriented multinationals have been “operating under outdated assumptions regarding Chinese consumers’ media and shopping behavior.” What are some of the key misconceptions you’ve come across in this area?

There are many misconceptions and this is really important given how fast media and shopping behavior is changing in China due to the Internet.

The first concerns where consumers are spending their time and where should marketing dollars be spent to reach them. Chinese users are spending nearly three hours online every day, which is a level of daily usage that exceeds the U.S. and rivals Japan. If [multinationals] are thinking that everyone in China is at home watching TV and are spending their marketing dollars accordingly, that would be very mistaken.