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Four China Businesses To Avoid
Interesting South China Morning Post article by Jeffrey Towson, author of the incredibly popular One Hour China Book. The article is Keep away from the “unicorns”: Four Chinese businesses you should avoid. It starts out noting that “if something hasn’t happened yet, there are probably good reasons why” and then lists the following as “businesses everyone talks about but nobody has ever actually seen,” hence the term unicorn:
Senior living. Long predicted, but simply not profitable because the elderly in China do not have much money and because “separating families is not a great idea in a country with historic Confucian norms.”
Private hospitals. Difficult to compete with state owned hospitals and difficult to hire doctors and nurses.
Canned soup. “Hard to sell quality food in a can when the alternative is a fresh vegetable market down the street.”
Funeral and burial services. The regulatory environment and the limited availability of land for burial make it just too difficult.
Towson concludes his article by encouraging those looking to do business in China to let others tread the above paths first:
Basically my advice is: Never be first in and never be last out. If it looks like a unicorn, let someone else spend years knocking down all the barriers. Then if they actually succeed, you can follow them in.
Makes sense to me. What do you think?
Source: http://www.chinalawblog.com/2014/11/four-china-businesses-to-avoid.html
