Breaking Waves
- Mea culpa! Time passes and CeBIT, though still a great show, is no longer as big as it once was. Old friend and former colleague George Ruffner, who runs the commercial section at the American Embassy in Berlin, tells me that CeBIT 2010 only had 4,000 exhibitors and 330,000 visitors. Still huge by Honolulu’s standards. See “Now That’s A Real Show!”
- My old friend Jargal Dambadarjaa posts an interesting Mongolian view of doing business in Japan. Worth a read.
- France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, says that the U.S. is setting a bad example of protectionism with its procurement of military tanker aircraft. Probably true. Not that European military procurements have always been completely free and open to competition.
- Talks open today in Qatar that could have a profound impact on world trade in some endangered species. I trained as a fisheries economist, and still have a lot of friends in the business, so it catches my attention that the UN conference to review the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (known to the trade by the more convenient CITES) will take a searching look at trade in bluefin tuna. It’s high time, despite my tendencies to favor free trade over all else. Bluefin has been massively overfished in the Atlantic, where the tuna population is now under severe stress. If our descendants are ever going to get a taste of this wonderful fish, we need to take drastic action now. The opposition to limiting trade in bluefin, of course, consists of the main fishing fleets in the Atlantic (Portugal, Spain, France) and the one market that consumes over half of the worldwide bluefin catch – Japan. The CITES meeting is also looking at trade in numerous other endangered species, such as elephant ivory and red coral, the subject of an earlier post.
- Why do we have world expos? Greed, pure and simple, says Tom Holland in the South China Morning Post (subscription required).
- China is now the top non-European market for France’s Bordeaux wines.
- Finally! The 2010 Formula 1 season begins this weekend in Bahrain. So why is this in a business blog (aside from being my favorite spectatator sport)? F1 cars are the world’s fastest and most expensive billboards and play an important role in international marketing. The sport offers glamour for firms seeking image advertising, and the coverage tops everything but the Suimmer Olympics and the soccer World Cup. Vroom!
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on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 at 6:58 am and is filed under Business Opportunities.
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