Author: Bill O'Connor

22 March 2024

Whip Roundup: China Edition is a simple digest of China related news, and a great source of interesting ideas and clever thoughts. This newsletter, produced primarily for a China-based audience, aims to ask good questions, provide concise updates on recent news, and engage your curiosity as we head into the weekend.

Asia space race heats up as China, Japan and India reach for the stars

• The future is now. For decades we’ve been hearing about a massive shift of capital from west to east and now we can see that as Asian countries put more resources into space exploration. This investment is likely to grow over the next 10 or 20 years, which should be good for R&D and hi-tech factory space.
• The attached article also says that China does have the financial resources to conduct major space missions on its own, but Japan does not. What percentage of people think the opposite?

China tries to stabilise pig population as pork prices plunge

• In the foreign press we often read about China’s “strategic pork reserves,” which is probably curious to an American audience. America’s most famous reserve is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; most Americans probably don’t think about food security the same way they think about energy security.
• The strategic pork reserves highlight China’s proactive food supply risk management and has gained attention in America. In 2020, David L. Ortega, an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University, wrote an article titled Could China’s strategic pork reserve be a model for the US?

Why skipping ropes are so expensive in China. Subheading: A new reason for parents to be angry with the education system

• I am very curious about this article because there is a similar situation in America. When I was in school everyone had to buy a Texas Instruments TI-85 graphing calculator. It was expensive, close to $100 at that time, yet we used it only a few times and later discovered it wasn’t mandatory for the exam.
• Surely now it’s not a calculator but some expensive and required app. When I read stories like this, I wonder… are we preparing our children for the workforce of the future?

Thanks for reading to the end of Whip Roundup.
Whip Roundup is a periodical for valued friends & colleagues. Please share your comments, corrections, and complaints at woconnor@whipconsulting.com. If you know anyone else who would be interested in receiving Whip Roundup, please forward it along!

Yours truly,

Bill O’Connor

23 June 2023

Thank you for joining me for the second issue of Whip Roundup, your favorite source of interesting ideas and clever thoughts.

Whip Roundup will help you whip up an interesting conversation, give you snap commentary on recent news, and spur your curiosity as we head into the weekend.

Whip up an interesting conversation
Talk to your friends and colleagues about TikTok.

• The US state of Montana became the first US state to ban TikTok, citing, among other concerns, the app’s ability to spy on Americans.
• Next time you’re talking to friends and colleagues about TikTok, remind them that “…we do have an alternative…”.

That’s what TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew said himself in written testimony to congress. He was talking about alternatives to banning the app, but India (more than four times the population of the US,) banned TikTok in 2020, to little long-term effect.

Indians just gravitated to alternatives like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and domestic TikTok-esque apps Moj & MX TakaTak. Besides, with TikTok eclipsing Facebook Instagram, and Facebook eclipsing MySpace before that, is banning TikTok even relevant?

I’m sure the cool kids have already moved on to the next hot app… which is why we don’t know about it.

Snap commentary
Working from home Commercial real estate or How to survive the coming winter in everyone’s favorite “notoriously cyclical” industry.

It’s obvious the reason all these CEOs want butts in seats is because they’re spending a fortune on their office leases. How can we parse the work from home revolution when the dust hasn’t even settled?

• On one hand^* you have Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway’s vice-chair and Warren Buffett’s old friend, saying bad commercial real estate (CRE) loans are the latest risk to the banking sector. On the other hand, you have office brokers saying, “the worst [is] behind us….”
• That’s what office brokerage firm JLL’s CEO Christian Ulbrich recently said on CNBC. When asked about the 50% of companies planning to downsize their offices, he said not to worry, that leaves 50% of companies that will expand!!!  “Or stay the same,” the host gently reminded him.

If the CEOs got rid of their expensive leases, would they care where their employees worked? Probably not. The sooner we can get past this work from home / return to office divide, the better everyone’s mental health, and society’s economic health, will be.

• Instead of badgering their employees to get back to the office, CEOs should ask their real estate brokers, who, remember, are “experts,” to act like it. This means saying the true but unpopular thing. Real estate is a relationship business. People hire you because 1. they like you and 2. because they trust you to close the deal. People don’t hire you because you tell them everything is fine when it’s obviously not.
• Real estate brokers should be more realistic. By saying “the world’s changed, but let’s figure this out together” they may just find a way to make money at every point in the cycle.

Spurring curiosity
Becoming Jackson Pollock.

• If you’re dreaming of a more creative life but stuck in a vortex of Microsoft Teams calls, Slack messages and Concur expense reports, try becoming Jackson Pollock. Re-energize your stale childhood art skills without being recklessly messy and causing chaos. After a bit of practice, I’m sure you’ll surpass my very obvious martini with an olive and a twist.

Don’t worry, there is no risk, success is guaranteed, and I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it 🙂

Thanks for reading to the end of Whip Roundup.
This space is reserved for the top thinkers… the masterminds, the theorists, the dreamers, the wanderlusters, and the nomads, people like you who care about how the world is put together and how we fit in it.

Whip Roundup is a periodical for valued friends & colleagues. Please share your comments, corrections, and complaints at woconnor@whipconsulting.com.

Yours truly,

Bill O’Connor

From the previous edition:

I love feedback.

Feedback included “this is great!” (thank you Joe!) and “…it feels a tad US centric…” (yes Chris, everyone in the states is desperate to know how Largs, North Ayshire, Scotland and Hong Kong compare on weatherspark.com’s Beach/Pool score… which is why I included it :-).

Actual content from the previous edition:

• Whip up a conversation: Talk to your clients and colleagues about remote work as a business risk. Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed recently, worried that their remote working culture was a business risk. (Paywall, let me know if you’d like a copy of the article.)
• Snap commentary: What geopolitical tensions? China buys record quantities of American corn and expands into Korea to take advantage of American subsidies.
• Spurring curiosity: Plan your next holiday with Weather Spark’s Tourism & Beach/Pool Scores.

*It’s not just Charlie Munger saying there’s trouble in commercial real estate. In the United States, only 48% of employees showed up at their offices for the week of 5 June 2023. The Chief Investment Officer for global investment and advisory firm Guggenheim Partners Anne Walsh said “we’re likely going into a real estate recession…”. For Chris readers who think Whip Roundup is too US-centric, and that Asia is immune from America’s WFH/RTO problems, Asia Pacific CRE investment volumes plunged by half in Q1 2023, MSCI sees “a broad range of aggregated physical climate risks across real estate in selected Asia-Pacific cities,” and Vanguard’s Asia Pacific focused Vanguard Global ex-U.S. Real Estate ETF is down over 33% in the last two years. Go figure.

21 April 2023

Happy Friday! I am trying out Whip Roundup. It is a periodical update for valued friends & colleagues, and I would appreciate your feedback!

Whip Roundup will help you whip up an interesting conversation, give you snap commentary on recent news, and spur your curiosity as we head into the weekend.

Whip up an interesting conversation
Talk to your clients and colleagues about remote work as a business risk.

• In the article ‘It is not cut-throat like Goldman Sachs’: SVB’s culture in focus, we see that Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed recently, worried that their remote working culture was a business risk.
• On your next workday call, quote Nicholas Bloom, a professor at Stanford University who has extensively studied remote working: “It is harder to have a challenging call over Zoom. It makes it harder to challenge management”. He went on to say [complex solutions] “like hedging interest rate risk often come up over lunch or in small meetings.”

Snap commentary
What geopolitical tensions?

• News media have been reporting geopolitical tensions between China and the United States, and this narrative is spilling into commercial market research. But I ask – what tensions?
• Refinitiv’s Inside Commodities newsletter is reporting that China is buying record quantities of American corn and expanding into Korea to take advantage of American subsidies. With symbiotic business decisions like these, how much room is there for tension?

Spurring curiosity
Planning your next holiday.

• This past week I’ve been toying with https://weatherspark.com/. Hopefully with the beginning of spring on 20 March you’re already planning your next vacation. Weather Spark’s Tourism Score and Beach/Pool Score will make it easy to compare where you’ll get the best weather.

I appreciate your time with Whip Roundup and would love your feedback. Please let me know if this is something useful you would like to receive in the future.

Yours truly,

Bill