Category: Business

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Business

Can We See $2 Gas Coming?

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It looks like it. The unusually warm Winter in the US. The continuing cut of OPEC’s crude production. The change of hands in US congress (oil companies’ friends are no longer in charge). The emerging of alternative energy: solar is reality now, just by looking at the solar Panel manufacturers’ IPOs on the Nasdaq lately. Not surprisingly, some of those are from China.

I am not going to speculating on the oil price for the near term or long term. That’s not my specialty. But on a related issue, I am going to predict consumers are continuing to spend, whether in US or China. They will continue to buy cars, dresses, electronics, music, shoes, and going out for movies, latte and dinners. My problem is trying to figure out which company will get sustainable growth/profit out of this 🙂

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Business China

New US China Direct Flight

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It’s official, the United Airlines won the battle. It will fly from Washington Dulles to Beijing, connecting two capitals. It appears to me American Airlines was the front runner but their pilot union doesn’t want to fly more than 15 hours from Dallas to Beijing, and that basically pulled AA out of race. I was thinking Continental’s New York and Shanghai route makes more economic sense because they are financial centers of the two countries. But obviously politics played a role here. With two existing routes from North America to Shanghai (San Francisco, Chicago), UA will have the biggest presence in US China routes. 

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Business Life

How Much Have I Changed in 6 Years?

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I have started working for about 6 years. Although I worked for the same employer and stayed in the same city, I can tell some of my changes in all these years.

First is hobbies. I used to be crazy about the cars. I can tell the most cars’ make and model on the street, except some classic models in 50s and 60s. I spent a lot of time on the web reading all the reviews, checking out cars in the dealers’ parking lot. And once I even bought and returned a car. We all know returning things to stores is relatively easy in the States, but returning cars is not, and I highly recommend readers not do that. This hobby faded away since I bought my condo, and I started looking more carefully about my personal finance situation. I think I still like the new car smell, but if I have to take a loan with interest to buy it, I won’t.

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Business Technology

Don’t Count eBay and Yahoo out

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Google is doing everything to become the king of the Internet. The holiday promotion of Google Check out is targeted towards eBay’s Paypal; in the search market it’s continuing gaining market share from Yahoo, although I still like Yahoo Mail better than GMail 🙂

eBay is not standing still, it’s raising the listing fees. As a seller on eBay I certainlly don’t like them raising fees. But if I am eBay share holder, I will love it 🙂 Seriously, in today’s world, raising fees without losing customer is always a good sign of competitive edge. Not many companies, online or offline, can do that easily because customers are expecting more while paying less. Remember the Oracle’s 50% off Linux support (vs. Redhat)?   

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Business Stocks

Heelys and Crocs Report Week Ending 06Jan07

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Well, Heelys (HLYS) the stock did not do much lately. But I am still doing my reality check, in the stores and on eBay. This week I am adding Crocs (CROX) because I bought some shares last December and plan to hold it for a while.

It appears my local Sports Authority(s) have sold most of Heelys, two (out of three stores) don’t have many in the shelf. On the other hand, those two stores moved Heelys back to the original “skate department”, vs. the main aisle. The other store still put it in main aisle (side by side with a knockoff product). The eBay sales are OK. Another interesting point is a “Heelys” search on flickr yields 102 results; it seems people are opening Xmas gifts now 🙂

Crocs are red hot this holiday season, despite it’s winter. I guess part of the reason is we got a relatively mild winter; and more importantly the company made a few smart decisions, such as co-branding with colleges, and opening the Kiosk in the malls (without any discount), etc. I think this is a safe bet compared to Heelys. Here are the numbers on eBay. This is mostly for fun, don’t take this too seriously.

            Heelys Crocs

01Jan07 1059  2121
02Jan07 1050  1856
03Jan07 1092  1803
04Jan07  971  1423
05Jan07  964  1415
06Jan07  961  1398 

(Update 09Jan): saw this post on Yahoo Message Board, it talked about the sales in Asia. Very postive.

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Business

Minimum Wage, Executive Pay and Jim Cramer

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This morning on my way to work, I saw some workers are on strike again at the Hilton’s construction site across street. I guess they are unionized workers fighting for the wage or benifits. Strike is nothing new to me, I remember during the UPS strike shortly after I came to the States in Fall 1997, the customers firmed long lines at Post Office. Couple years ago there was a big strike among Grocery Store workers, and I tried not to cross the picket line at the Shop N Save near my apartment: I bought grocery at Sams Club or the Chinese grocery store. 

Today is a good day for many workers actually, because the  pro-labor Democratic Party took the control of Congress, and there will a raise of miminum wage from $5.15  to $7.15 in 2 years. President Bush promised he will sign it. On the other hand, yesterday there was some news on Home Depot, the No. 2 retailer in the US. CEO Bob Nardelli was fired, or put it more politely, he resigned with $210 million severance pay. Obviously the Home Depot shareholders cried foul on his pay because the stock did not do well under Bob’s tenure. But what can they do? The pay was predetermined before he got hired.

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Business

Amazon is Going After Shoes and Bags

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Amazon have already sold those in its main web site. The only thing new here is they are going to launch a new site for this. The site is called endless. I don’t know too much about bags but I know the footwear sales through the web is increasing. As a testimony I bought two pairs of shoes through zappos last year. I am not worried about zappos, but I think traditional brick and mortar discount stores such as DSW will feel the pressure. Since I owned some footwear stocks, I checked out footwear stores from time to time. It seems to me consumers will be the ultimate winners here 🙂

zappos logo shoes online web

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Business Fun

Chicken Prices Went Up

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I noticed the Chicken price went up a little yesterday. I have not bought the whole roasted chicken from Schnuck for a while because usually when I got there at 6:30 or 7 PM, they are sold out. But I got it yesterday evening and I realized they are charging $5.99; it was $4.99 last time I bought (a while ago). So I did a little google search on “chicken price”, and found out the main reason: the corn is becoming more expensive as more corn is needed to make ethonal (alternative fuel), and rising energy cost. Note chicken ate corn so that they can grow. So don’t rush to buy “chicken producer” stocks such as Tyson yet. Although they charge higher price for chicken, they are paying higher raw material cost (corn) too.

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Business China

Internet Disruptions Due to Taiwan Earthquake

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It seems to me the Internet connection from China to the outside world was down, because I could not get to some of the sites from baidu news. I attached the official email from iTalkBB, my IP phone provider at the end of this post. For me it’s just some inconvenience, but how much effect it would have on the business depending on the Internet connection between China and the US? Oh well, maybe they will have a backup plan. Here is another article about the Internet outage.

From a smaller scale, I don’t know the effect on people trading Chinese domestic stocks (A shares) from the US, vice versa. In this case, a good connection means money 🙂 

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Business China

eBay’s New Strategy in China

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eBay’s China effort took a big hit today, or use eBay’s own term, they are adopting a “new strategy” in the China C2C market: they are going to team up with Tom Online on the online auction site. Whatever the term they use, the real story is they were losing market share ever since they acquired the eachnet, and put it under eBay China umbrella. There are many external factors to their failure:

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