We landed in Beijing at about noon, a bit early. The airport is huge, soaring, spotless, and extremely well-designed. After a very short wait at customs I was whisked by a car from the hotel into the city. My initial impression was very different than what I expected. There are many bicycles but not nearly as many as I thought there would be. Traffic is a bit crazier than in Philadelphia but not much. (That said, making a left turn across traffic seems to be a game of chicken – between a crazy mix of taxis, bicycles tiny cars, and luxury cars. The main avenue leading to my hotel is lined with every one of the most expensive car dealerships: Rolls Royce, Mercedes, Aston Martin, Ferrari, etc and there are more Audis and BMWs on the street than in New York. It’s clear that there’s a lot of wealth here.

I was lucky to be upgraded to a huge room. I was warned that it’s critical to stay up until 10 the first night or jet lag will kill you, so I resisted drowsiness (I only slept a couple of hours on the plane, unfortunately), unpacked, worked out, and got ready to go to my first meeting. There had been some email exchange about how to get to dinner, and I knew that I was to get a car which would wait for me at the restuarant, just because it was my first day, but I didn’t have my final itinerary and had no booking information. So I got one from the hotel.

I met Jinwoo So and his assistant Tony Choi at an Italian restaurant, Tavolo. Mr. So is a 2006 Fellow and a runs a variety of business development groups at SK Telecom, including their Chinese market efforts. He is President, Growth & Innovation CIC, SK China and President, C&I Business, SK Telecom, China. We had a wide-ranging and very interesting conversation about the market, the business culture, the tremendous opportunity here, and the challenges. Mr. So is vey entrepreneurial, smart, knowledgeable, and charming (and speaks perfect English). His assistant Mr. Choi was also very impressive, young and with a very good understanding of the Chinese market, particularly for Internet companies. He’s been here for three years and is fluent in Chinese as well as English and his native Korean.

Some of the key things that were expressed by both men:

• There is an amazing growth of wealth here. It is what we’d think of in the U.S. as “new money” and it is driving luxury consumerism at an amazing pace. The prices of luxury cars here are double what the are elsewhere. There isn’t yet a maturity in the consumption, it is not value-based.
• There is a very small middle class, it’s not really a market yet – it’s the rich who are buying
• The Chinese culture is capitalist at the core, which is not the same thing at all as being democratic. All that’s happened in recent decades is that the capitalist tendencies have been unleashed.
• Working with and through government here is critical. It is easier often to do that at the local level, where economic development is the priority and the question of Chinese or foreign companies driving that development is less important.
• Regardless of where you’re doing business, it’s all about the relationship. Mr. Choi made the interesting observation that one reason for this is that the country is so big – unless an individual is enmeshed in a spider’s web of relationships, it’s just too easy to do something bad then head off to another province where no one knows you.
• It is incredibly difficult for non-Chinese companies to succeed in China. Note that Skype is alone among large internet players succeeding here. The recent announcement that Xinhua and China Mobile are joining forces to create a mobile search company.
• There seems to be a winning formula in the internet space here: a founding team that is a mix of people who are here and steeped in the local culture and business community with hai gai (or sea turtles – Chinese who have studied and/or worked abroad and are now coming back).

Finally, it was fun to witness a bit of Korean etiquette while here. I got half of the business card exchange right: hold the card with two hands, present it carefully. But forgot with the first one that I should study it carefully for some time and make a comment of some sort about it. Mr. Choi took care of all of the logistics for diner, from the reservation before to summoning the server and paying.

I am looking forward to meeting Mr. Wang, CEO of Cy-Fan. Mr. So made that introduction for me and appreciate the help tremendously.

I’m blogging this at 3 a.m., unfortunately, after only 5 hours of sleep. I generally sleep about 6 hours but I’m worried that i’ll collapse by the end of the day. I have four meetings, including dinner.

A note on technology logistics – I have connectivity via a short ethernet cord, there’s no wifi in the room. Happily it was easy to share my connection with my iPad so I can surf and email from bed. And Skype works perfectly.

Finally, I don’t think I’ll be doing such long posts from here on. I’ll be trying to do brief summaries of each meeting.