Latest / The Dutch Investors / #69 | The Rise of China | Interview w/ John Lin

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#69 | The Rise of China | Interview w/ John Lin · The Dutch Investors

0:18
SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to the Dutch Investors podcast.
0:21
SPEAKER_02: Today we're talking about something many investors love talking about, especially in our community.
0:28
SPEAKER_02: It's uh it's everywhere, it's in geopolitics, it's in global markets, it's the rise of China.
0:34
SPEAKER_02: And to explore this properly, we invited someone who has a foot in both worlds.
0:39
SPEAKER_02: John Lin, a Dutch-born Chinese keynote speaker, has lots of insider knowledge on uh e-commerce companies and uh strategy.
0:49
SPEAKER_02: So, John, it's great to have you here.
0:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, thanks for the invite.
0:53
SPEAKER_02: Awesome to be here.
0:55
SPEAKER_02: We haven't formally met before this talk, although I heard you speak at a Dutch investors conference uh recently, and like I said before, the the talk stuck with me, but afterwards I felt a bit unfinished.
1:08
SPEAKER_02: I had so many more follow-up questions and absolutely zero time to ask them.
1:12
SPEAKER_02: So I'm glad we can do it today.
1:14
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and happy to do so.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: I got a big list from you, so we have lots of content.
1:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I hope so.
1:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:20
SPEAKER_02: Maybe to give the listeners some context around what you do and why you do what you do.
1:25
SPEAKER_02: Where did it all start?
1:26
SPEAKER_02: And uh where did your interest for e-commerce and uh the fascination between China and the Western society come from?
1:35
SPEAKER_02: E-commerce, maybe?
1:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: So I have a background in innovation sciences, so I also studied that and had a degree in innovation management.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: I I've always been a tech nerd.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: Like I've I've looked up to the Elon Musks and the Steve Jobs and the Mark Zuckerbergs, like the obvious Silicon Valley superstars, and that was like 10 years ago.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: And then I went to work uh at bull.com, that's the Dutch Amazon.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's a daughter company on the Ajol Delhaze, there's also a listed company.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: And the fun thing was during my six or seven years in the strategy team of that company, it was always Amazon, Amazon, Amazon.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: Like, what do we do if Amazon comes?
2:13
SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, I was thinking, wait a minute, every time when I visit my family in China, everything we say here in the Netherlands, like this is the future of e-commerce.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: They solved it in China like yesterday.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: So, what we think is the future was already fixed in China in customer propositions, in logistical infrastructure, especially everything in digital, how they shop, how they communicate, how the adoption is in digital, like my grandparents are super online.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: So I was the yeah, almost irritating guy talking to all the ex-MKKinsey BCG colleagues who have like 10-15 years' experience, and I was just the junior of the team.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, but why don't we just copy what Alibaba is doing or JD is doing in China or Tencent?
2:58
SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, but who is gonna listen to the junior?
3:02
SPEAKER_00: At the same time, my fascination like for the American superstar CEOs also changed because China was creating their own superstar CEO, so Jack Maas, the most famous one, but Pony Mar from Tencent, Richard Liu from JD.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: They have all big superstar CEOs these days.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: And so my fascination changed.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: Like, wait a minute.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: China is also very cool, they are also building very cool companies, they are doing things way different with their culture, management styles.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: They are super flat and super not like top-down, as we usually like to think.
3:38
SPEAKER_00: So they are totally different, they invest in different ways.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: So that was the big fascination, and I try to bring yeah, bring that knowledge back to my work quite hard because we have a big bias about what to believe about China or not, partly aided by the general media.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: And that was my job for like partly strategy, partly inspiring about China.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: And three years ago, Ball.com needed to go sub-IPO.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: It never went through, but I also helped the IP with the IPO work, and that uh didn't go through, but I still had to make the choice: okay, John, your side hustle as a keynote speaker, you cannot combine it anymore.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: So I took the choice three years ago to start for myself as a speaker, as a China expert.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: I became a board member at the Nanos China Business Council.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: So we bring Dutch and Chinese companies together for networking events to do business together and enjoying life ever since.
4:29
SPEAKER_02: That's pretty cool.
4:30
SPEAKER_02: And was that part of the reason you couldn't combine it?
4:34
SPEAKER_02: But was part of the reason maybe the fact that they didn't really listen to you and to follow up, have they come back to you now that they realize that Timu, AliExpress, Amazon is all trying to gain ground here in the Netherlands or in Europe?
4:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: So the reason I had to leave was because of the IPO thing and legal reasons people could not have side hustles anymore with conflicts of interests, and they believe that me doing keynotes about Chinese e-commerce was a conflict of interest.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: And so that's yeah, it's not something I'm angry about.
5:06
SPEAKER_00: It's the smaller company becoming corporate.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: So that's what happens with all companies, and I'm just like an aunt in the system.
5:14
SPEAKER_00: At the same time, I was always yelling okay, the Chinese are coming.
5:17
SPEAKER_00: Uh we took the board to China for an inspiration trip.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: We met all the big Chinese tech companies.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: The conclusion was, I think, back in 2019 already.
5:26
SPEAKER_00: Oh shit, we're fucked.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: When the Chinese companies come from Europe, we're fucked.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: And that was 2019.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: So the mother company of Timu, Pin Doro, uh listed as PDD on the NASDAQ, they were just founded, they were just beginning in China.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: The mother company of TikTok, Byte Dance, they were still students in their dorm rooms creating this new social media app.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: And now, six, seven years later, they are like massive companies, so that's the speed in which China goes.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: So we only visit like the traditional e-commerce companies.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: And so before you know it, you have a new competitor, they're coming here.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: Back back then, back in the Netherlands.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, it's really hard to create a strategy or a future plan.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: Okay, what do we do about these Chinese companies?
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the Amazon task force, which I was leading, we had a plan of more than 250 pages.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: What do we do when Amazon enters the market?
6:22
SPEAKER_00: And there was nothing for the Chinese companies, so it's it was really abstract.
6:25
SPEAKER_00: I think partly it's being naive and also arrogance, like, okay, we are not afraid of the Chinese companies, it's happening in China.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: What works there doesn't work here.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: So it's it was a big blind spot, and now we know the blind spot is yeah, is in our face, they're in the backyard.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: jd.com is buying Saturn, uh, the Sasonomy group, Saturn and Media Market.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, the Chinese are here and they are coming in really hard.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: So you see the growth of the whole e-comm retail market is all moving to the Chinese.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: So I think the whole market grew 15% this year or last year, and most of the growth went to the Chinese companies.
7:09
SPEAKER_02: Just out of curiosity, I don't know if you can share this, but if you can't, that's fine as well.
7:14
SPEAKER_02: What were some of the plans do you think when Amazon entered the Netherlands?
7:19
SPEAKER_02: Like the the strategy you talked about.
7:22
SPEAKER_02: And do you think if you had to write the plan for Chinese competitors coming into the Netherlands, would it be vastly different or similar?
7:31
SPEAKER_00: A vastly different because Amazon, Bull, or like Western e-commerce companies all have a similar business model, especially if they're if they're going into the marketplace space.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: So Amazon and Bull are marked partly marketplace companies.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: They basically all do the same.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: They have like search engines, you have a product listing, sellers putting the product on the side on the site, you have advertising business models, logistical business models, they're all basically the same.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: They copy each other, they work in a western way of doing their business.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: So they also don't work together.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: That's also an interesting thing.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: Like your art rivals.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: So the plan, like when Amazon comes, they will buy a lot of media.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: So creating their brands, creating their customer familiarity.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: So to counter that, you just spend a lot of the same, you do actually do the same things.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: So, okay, we buy all the marketing slots, we make sure customers don't go to Amazon, we match the prices.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: So I think for weeks, and then that's that's a big war chest problem.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: So you need a lot of cash to match all the pricing of the most popular products.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: So you want to prevent that when Amazon enters your market, that the media can say, Oh yeah, Amazon is cheaper than the rest.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: So all the prices were matched very aggressively, so there was a big war chest.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: And when you look back in Google and like the old articles, you say, Oh, Amazon is not that much cheaper than the local marketplaces.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: So that's the first success you need to have.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: The second one is Amazon is very aggressive on Prime.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: So Amazon is willing to pay up to$150 to get a new Prime customer.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: So that's the acquisition cost, so that's super aggressive.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: And so you need to counter that.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: So Bull has their SELT program, select membership, they work together with the Albert supermarket brands under Aho Dohaza to create also this customer loyalty base because the whole market, I think the top 10% consumers, they spend 90% of the revenue in the e-commerce market.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: So you want to make sure to capture that loyalty of this top 10%.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: That's the long-term game.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: Putting your brand there.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: And the interesting thing is, most people ask me, yeah, will Bull go down, like the local e-commerce hero?
9:44
SPEAKER_00: Actually, not, not for the first five years.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: It will grow even harder because the big the incumbent number one player has the money, has the capital, has the resources in also in developers to compete with Amazon.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: What will die first is like the rest, the older players that still have physical retail stores, a lot of legacy, no power to innovate, companies who actually didn't change that much, you see those players dying down first.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: So you see the big two or three that can compete, they will grow, there the rest will die off.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: But they still essentially compete for the same consumers.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: When you talk about the Chinese companies, they come in, they don't compete for the same consumers at first.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: So if you look at, for instance, Pindodo, they were way later than Alibaba.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: Alibaba used that 80% market share in China, and Alibaba and JD, the big number one and two, they had focused on the big rich cities in China, so the eastern part.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: So 400 million Chinese people, university degrees, work hard in the big cities, have money to spend.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: That's the part where they're focused.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: And then Pink Dodo thought, wait a minute, we still have 1 billion people in poorer parts of the country.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: We need to have a proposition for them as well.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: So they started the concept of group buying, so real innovation, group buying with overstock from factories, from overstock from farmers, and then aggregating that volume.
11:14
SPEAKER_00: So we cannot buy something on ourselves, we need to find 10 friends, and then we buy it together for 90% discount.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: So they were the extreme discounter of China, so they gained 15% market share within three years.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: So this is actually textbook blue ocean strategy.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: When you look at Western Europe, the same thing has actually happened because Bull, Koblue, Amazon, all the big e-commerce players, local or international, focus on the rich young parents with young children who order their diapers online and they don't care if it's a bit more expensive.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: And it needs to be fast because convenience is everything.
11:53
SPEAKER_00: But when you look at the people that go to the discounters, so in the Netherlands, it is Wibra, Action, Zeman, it's like the dollar shops, those people don't shop online.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: And Timu, Xiin, AliExpress, the big Chinese e-commerce platforms focus on those groups, and they have like 200-300% growth in the first few years, because those groups have something online to shop, and then you have a knock-on effect that the people going to the Amazons they see, wait a minute, I see the same product, but it's twice as cheap on Timu.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: Because Amazon has for uh 70%, 70% Chinese sellers on their platform, and they know, oh, I can sell to white people, I can make a lot of money on that.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, Timu says, Yeah, no, you're not you're not asking the same prices, you're asking a bit above the Chinese prices, and we will try to get some market share for Amazon.
12:49
SPEAKER_00: So they gay is take over a different consumer, so you need a total different strategy to counter what they're doing.
12:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, might be part of the strategy behind all those discounts, right?
13:03
SPEAKER_02: Part of uh trying to get the consumers with less money and giving all these discounts away.
13:08
SPEAKER_02: Do you think they're are they always unprofitable in the beginning?
13:12
SPEAKER_02: Like making losses, trying to get these consumers and then upscaling, or how does that work?
13:17
SPEAKER_02: How do they do it in China compared to Western countries?
13:20
SPEAKER_00: And so the Chinese e-commerce platforms are in China extremely profitable.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: They add billions every quarter, and they have extremely yeah, they have a lot of cash on hand and little debt because they have been doing it for 10-15 years.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: So Timu spends$4 billion a year on online marketing.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: The mother company, Pindodore, has, I think this year's 16 or 17 billion in eBit from the Chinese market.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: So it's like one quarter of profit you put in.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: Like that's your growth money for Europe and the US.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: They have, I think, over 40 billion dollar cash on hand.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: They're super asset-light, so they can afford to have the Timu part being unprofitable on the operational part.
14:07
SPEAKER_00: When you look at the product line items, like every product sale, that's actually profitable because the same product on Timu, you will find it in China for, I think, three times cheaper.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: So we get we are getting scammed on Timu, actually, if you ask my Chinese friends.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: So there's like two or three hundred percent profit on the product.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: Uh the big problem is logistics, they lose m they lose money on logistics.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: So when you get the total picture, they are still losing money.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but that's just the first part.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: We we we grow, we use expensive logistics because all airplane, and then when we know the business is viable, then they start investing in local warehouses.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: They put that stuff forward because uh because the European Union and the and the US with the tariffs, they don't like the cheap Chinese packages, so they are putting all kinds of tariffs tariff walls on there.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: So you see the Chinese companies, okay.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: Then we build our warehouses earlier.
15:06
SPEAKER_00: So a lot of Chinese companies have dozens of warehouses in Europe and US already to do something about the tariff issue.
15:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I've I've noticed this as well.
15:18
SPEAKER_02: Chinese companies building their own delivery networks in Europe.
15:22
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
15:22
SPEAKER_02: I think one of them is like Go for Express, which is priced way below DHL or uh PostNL in the Netherlands.
15:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Zero Logistics also have the doubles.
15:32
SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, they have you have multiple.
15:33
SPEAKER_02: Is this part of like a bigger move since it's so expensive?
15:38
SPEAKER_02: What is the end goal here, you think?
15:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so if you look at China on a broader scale, their strategy is we need to go global.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: We are strong enough now to go global.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: So years ago, it was all Western brands going into China.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: China needed to protect its market because yeah, you know, if if Nike is coming in and buying everything and hollowing out your country, you don't want to want to have that.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: So they they had protectionism from a point of view like we are the developing country, we need to make sure we can develop on our own.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: Now they say, okay, our companies are strong enough.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: So for Nike, they have a competitor called Anta.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: Anta is going international, the retail companies, yeah.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: So they have multiple answers for Amazon, car companies, of course, and also tech.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: So for ASML, they don't have an answer yet, but like for on phones, laptops, and all the other cool stuff, they have their own local competitors who are super successful, and they say, Yeah, go global.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: We can now compete with the Americans, with the Europeans.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh and like if you're CEO of, for instance, BYD, you have the ambition to become a number one car player.
16:45
SPEAKER_00: And you owe it also to your investors, which was Warren Buffett in the beginning.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: You owe it to your investors to also grow and become successful.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: So that's what they are doing because there's more market outside of China.
16:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that makes sense.
16:59
SPEAKER_02: It's a big, a big, um, a big market, especially Europe and uh and America for China.
17:04
SPEAKER_02: During my conversation with uh Jeffrey Towson, I think you might know him, another Chinese tech expert, he said that Europe and the United States are trying to play catch-up with China, especially technology-wise.
17:16
SPEAKER_02: But he also asked, like, the follow-up question that has stuck with me do we really want to do that?
17:22
SPEAKER_02: And I think what he meant to say was that the fact that China has such a tight grip on its people, can pay lower wages, can be flexible with ethical and environmental rules, they can build a dark factory in a couple months at a fraction of the time and cost it takes us to build it here.
17:39
SPEAKER_02: Do you think the United States and Europe can fight this and compete?
17:44
SPEAKER_02: And I guess my question is: why is China able to innovate so much faster compared to us and do this type of thing?
17:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, multiple questions.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: I think the first one is we don't have to compete.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: We need to be competitive.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: That's another thing.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: I think we should collaborate.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: Like the Dutch are the best in agriculture.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: No one comes close.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: China has a food problem, like 60% of their food still gets imported from outside.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: That's a big problem for them.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: The Dutch are the best in food, but why would we compete on China with assembling phones?
18:19
SPEAKER_00: We can just okay, you do the phones, I do the food, and we help each other.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: That's the way we should do it.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: And then you have your expertise, you will be reliant on each other, but in a way that's more sustainable, more nice, and I think maybe more romantic.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: It's not viable for us to build clothing factories, phone factories, battery factories.
18:41
SPEAKER_00: We should have a few to be to like if shit happens, if shit hits the fan, you should have it.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: But don't expect us to become better in building phones than the Chinese.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: But hey, we can't we are the best in doing food, we are the best in building semiconductor machines.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: That's trade.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: That's what trade is for.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: I think that's the way we should do it, and like the whole deglobalization thing, decoupling thing, it makes no sense.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: It makes it create so much overhead, it makes us as a as a people of Earth so inefficient.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, it's it's it's actually stupid.
19:20
SPEAKER_00: We should just become friends and play nice with each other and help each other, but that's that's actually not what's happening, so that's the sad part.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: So I think that's what I hope we should we we achieve because we are both we are all good in something else, and that's how you can become friends.
19:36
SPEAKER_00: And the other thing is we we heard we hear it a lot, like, yeah, China, cheap labor, uh, slave labor, whatever, bad ethics.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: But they build the dark factories.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: I was at the factory of Xiaomi, super nice, super clean.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: They said, Yeah, we have 70% automation.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: Two and a half thousand people work here, and they produce a thousand cars a day.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: Two and a half FTE per car per day.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: That's not bad labor practice.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: That's just robots.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: So I think when you look at that, okay, they build a lot of dark factories and they do it really fast.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: It's it's mainly about the paperwork.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: It's all paperwork building fast factories.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: And there are just no people anymore doing the dirty jobs in those factories.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: So so that's the part we're not seeing.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: They are doing like even mining work, because you need a lot of rare earth minerals, mining work is getting automated like crazy in China.
20:44
SPEAKER_00: No one's doing no one wants to do the dirty work, they don't want to do it as well, but they do the innovation to automate that stuff and make it nicer.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:55
SPEAKER_00: We shouldn't forget about that, and we shouldn't thinking that China is like cheap and dirty, that's a wrong way of thinking.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: I think there is a famous quote of Tim Cook.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: Tim Cook he said on a conference like, there is a misunderstanding for Apple going to China because of cheap labor.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: China hasn't been cheap for a long time anymore.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: Apple goes to China because of the skilled workers.
21:20
SPEAKER_00: And he mentioned tooling engineers.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: Like, okay, if we I need tooling engineers in the US, maybe he can fill a small classroom.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: If he needs tooling engineers in China, he can fill foot fill football stadiums.
21:35
SPEAKER_00: And you need those engineers to make the machines that build our iPhones.
21:40
SPEAKER_02: So you're saying we should collaborate and work together, and I think I agree mostly.
21:47
SPEAKER_02: But maybe what you're missing here is that we don't want to be too dependent on each other like we currently are on the United States, right?
21:56
SPEAKER_02: So are we just switching from the US to China then?
21:59
SPEAKER_02: And do you work?
22:00
SPEAKER_02: If we just let's say we we collaborate on uh on trading food for technology and phones and stuff, which we s already are, I guess, sort of.
22:09
SPEAKER_02: Do you worry about China spying on us, maybe selling our data, or just you know, that's that's something the Europe works.
22:17
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you hear it a lot.
22:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: And so for instance, we okay, we are good in uh no, that goes one step back.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: Europe is still the bitch of the US.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: We just do whatever they say.
22:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, true.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: So the US said you cannot sell uh you EU V's machines to China, so we are doing that, and China China really wants them.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: But we know China is extremely good in building dark factories.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: We have no skill here in building those things, and the dark factories also solve our labor problem in Europe.
22:48
SPEAKER_00: We can easily say if we have if we wear our own pants, make our own decisions as Europe, we can say, okay, dear China, we can sell you EOV machines, but you have to help us building dark factories in Europe.
23:02
SPEAKER_00: Then we can become self-reliant.
23:07
SPEAKER_00: And the same thing applies to the food part.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: Okay, we help you to increase the efficiency of your food production by by two.
23:15
SPEAKER_00: But you need to help us creating our own supply chains.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: So create those mines for us that that automate that with the robots driving around and doing the mining work.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: You can trade those things, but currently we're not doing that, and the spying part, I think it's way overblown.
23:31
SPEAKER_00: So we had uh I think last time there was an article in the paper, like, yeah, a lot of buses, like public transport buses, are becoming Chinese now because we want electric buses, but there are no European companies making good ones, so we buy Chinese ones, yeah.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, yeah, they can spy on us because they have the buses on the road.
23:49
SPEAKER_00: And then the bus companies say, it omitted.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: Like the the trip computer in the buses are local ones.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: We buy the buses from BYD, but we install our own computers.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: What are you talking about?
24:01
SPEAKER_00: Like it's it's that was the CEO of the bus company.
24:04
SPEAKER_00: So it's you can mitigate those things, and at the same time, ASML saying and TSMC, oh, if China invades TSMC, we can shut off the ASML machines remotely.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: We are not that different.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: We can do the same things to each other.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: So uh and the same thing already happens with Nvidia.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: So Nvidia and China's uh Trump said, okay, we you can sell the H20 chip to China, and the Chinese government says install those H20 chips because Nvidia can spy on us.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: So you have those litigations both ways.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: It happens both ways.
24:41
SPEAKER_00: I think we should always think everyone can listen to each other.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: That's that's just just what happens.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: Every intelligence company is the same.
24:47
SPEAKER_00: The CIA or the NSA can follow everything we do on our like Netgear routers or whatever, there's always a back door.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: You should at some point believe everyone can watch everything, but how do you design a system where that doesn't matter?
25:01
SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, like, okay, we invest in China, and yeah, the Chinese government can do whatever they want, they can take a company or whatever.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: Who just took a company tour one month ago?
25:14
SPEAKER_00: Fair enough.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: We did.
25:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a bit hypocritical, right?
25:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I guess.
25:22
SPEAKER_02: So, how come people and investors underestimate China so much?
25:26
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I have a real fascination with China.
25:29
SPEAKER_02: I love talking to people that that go there, that live there, and just seeing what it's really like, like the culture, the tech stack.
25:37
SPEAKER_02: Uh so why is it that most people don't really notice what's happening there and how fast technology is evolving in China, from what I hear?
25:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh, two parts.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: So, one part is our media bias towards the US, and the second part is bad marketing by China and Chinese companies.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: So, we just don't get the good news from there because there is a bias and we don't want to believe it.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: But also, the we all know what's happening in Japan.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: Like, everyone wants to go to holiday to Japan.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: But Japan is next to China, but Japan does a really good job in creating the marketing like for tourism about what is it to be in Japan?
26:15
SPEAKER_00: And well, how is how is holiday there?
26:17
SPEAKER_00: The good food, the nice anime stuff.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: And China is historically quite bad in this this uh they call it soft power.
26:26
SPEAKER_00: It is becoming better because we have like TikTok and we have like Chinese rap songs going viral, popmart with the laboobus.
26:33
SPEAKER_00: And so the Chinese soft power is slowly getting better.
26:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh I have more and more fans that want to go to China for holiday.
26:41
SPEAKER_00: They are opening up like the VPN stuff.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: So when you are a foreigner, you go into China, you do you install an eSIM, there's a VPN included, so your WhatsApp and your YouTube all works.
26:50
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to get a visa anymore when you go on to go into China.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: So they are opening up.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: So that's good.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: So it's it is becoming better, the marketing part.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: So I hope in a few years people will get to know more about these Chinese companies because you we are getting exposed more by them.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, some at some point the Chinese companies also have blown it for themselves because we get exposed to the cheap Chinese brands.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: I think, especially the last 10 years, AliExpress, Xi, and Timu.
27:19
SPEAKER_00: But now also the Chinese A brands are coming.
27:21
SPEAKER_00: So we have, of course, the phones we had for a while, the Xiaomi's, the Oppo's, the Huawei, so they were like a quality products.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: People love them.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: Uh the Chinese cars are coming, good cars, so not the cars with one-star crash rating, the like the coffin's on wheels.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: That that part is over, but people are still thinking that.
27:38
SPEAKER_00: And JD buying MediaMark.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: JD is like the the premium cool blue wall, no, not more Walmart, even more premium than Walmart, like the high-quality player of China.
27:47
SPEAKER_00: So there's finally a good high-quality retail platform coming to the to Europe.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, they bought a big one in Europe.
27:57
SPEAKER_00: So I hope that reputation will change.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: And also, yeah, but like people don't most people don't notice it.
28:02
SPEAKER_00: Like, every solar panel, home battery, wind farm, whatever you see is Chinese.
28:06
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, actually, I I think a lot of people underestimate how much stuff is actually Chinese.
28:11
SPEAKER_02: I think most people still think it's junk.
28:14
SPEAKER_02: And when I grew up, I was taught by my parents that Chinese items were junk.
28:19
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and it usually was-and that was and it was true.
28:21
SPEAKER_00: It was true.
28:21
SPEAKER_02: It usually was.
28:22
SPEAKER_02: It was the country that copied Western products and services, but were able to make it much cheaper, although the quality uh was lacking as well.
28:30
SPEAKER_02: But China was transitioning from like a third to a second world country and is now becoming a world leader, if not the world leader.
28:37
SPEAKER_02: I mean, if we're looking at it objectively, I think China has shown its power over the United States now.
28:44
SPEAKER_00: It was the only country that would go against Trump.
28:46
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, stand up.
28:47
SPEAKER_02: The only one.
28:48
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
28:48
SPEAKER_02: The only one.
28:49
SPEAKER_02: So I remember buying my first Xiaomi phone.
28:52
SPEAKER_02: Is that how I pronounce it?
28:54
SPEAKER_02: Xiaomi, yeah, almost.
28:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, about 10 years ago.
28:56
SPEAKER_02: And when I told people it was cheap and amazing, no one really believed me.
29:02
SPEAKER_02: And now you have some of the best battery makers, AI and the logistics companies, and of course, several excellent Chinese tech companies in China.
29:12
SPEAKER_02: So now it feels like China is probably as good, if not better, than Europe's and the US.
29:18
SPEAKER_02: So, how did this happen?
29:21
SPEAKER_02: Did we become lazy, or what did they do to basically outgrow us and outpace us there?
29:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I think what you said, lazy?
29:30
SPEAKER_00: That's a big part.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: So I think one of especially Western Europe, our wealth is a problem.
29:38
SPEAKER_00: We are way too comfortable here.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: We want to go on holiday twice or three times a week.
29:43
SPEAKER_00: The Americans do better because they work, I think, at least quite as hard as the Chinese.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: So for people listening, working at American companies, they usually hear the thing, yeah, the Europeans, they're always on holiday.
29:55
SPEAKER_00: And the Chinese companies work really hard.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: Uh what's unique about China is the competition.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: The competition is extreme.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: So you are a Xiaomi, but you have like 10 or 15 extremely competent phone competitors.
30:08
SPEAKER_00: When you're an electric car maker in China, you have like 100, currently 150 competitors, and they're all good ones.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: There used to be 650, but most of them died off or got acquired.
30:18
SPEAKER_00: And the same thing applies, like, oh yeah, you're a fashion brand in China.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, there were there are 100 good competitors.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: You're a cosmetics brand.
30:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there are 100 good competitors because there are so many smart people, there is so many like capital investors around that you can really compete on a very high level.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: So, in the management circles, they say if you are a brand or a company in China, it's like a gym.
30:46
SPEAKER_00: China has become the gym of the world for companies, and if you can win in China, you can win everywhere.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: Because the pace is so fast, like if you have a cool feature today, in two weeks, your competitor will have it as well.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: And you can see it especially in with electric cars with the charging speed.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: So BYD announced, yeah, I have megawatt charging, you can charge up within 12 minutes, and then uh cattle, CATL in about in one or two months, yeah, we have it as well.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: We can do it, it's even faster.
31:14
SPEAKER_00: It's super quick because they have so many engineers, and that's that makes sure that you become really sharp.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: And when you look at like the companies here over here in the west, okay, if you are a German car manufacturer, if you are in the premium segment, BMW, Audi, Mercedes, that's it.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: That those are your competitors.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: But in China they have like 20-30 different ones that build very good premium cars that have way more technology.
31:42
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and the reason is if you are like Huawei's Luxe brand, you don't have history.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: You cannot say I am the oldest luxury car brand, whatever.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: You don't have that reputation.
31:53
SPEAKER_00: So, what can you do?
31:55
SPEAKER_00: Really do innovation.
31:56
SPEAKER_00: You have air suspension that can jumps around, the car parks on its own, because you have to differentiate not on brand, but on innovation.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: So it's the competition that makes it so cutthroat, and that's that makes it also also super dynamic because you never know when there is a next competitor.
32:17
SPEAKER_00: Xiaomi is the cool example because two years ago they didn't make cars.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: Now two years later, they are top five car brands in China.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, insane.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: So they sold in two minutes more cars than Audi did electric cars than Audi did for electric cars in a whole year.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: And that company two years ago didn't even have a car factory.
32:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
32:41
SPEAKER_02: I remember back in the day looking at Xiaomi's management, which was really like the the thing that stood out most to me, that they were not afraid to just go for it.
32:52
SPEAKER_02: And if it if it failed, they they took several key lessons from it and they just kept going.
32:57
SPEAKER_02: It was some of the most fascinating management teams I've I've looked into.
33:01
SPEAKER_02: Uh never bought into Xiaomi, unfortunately.
33:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
33:04
SPEAKER_00: Back in the day, they were just Apple copycats.
33:07
SPEAKER_00: They copied everything from Apple.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: The design of the phone, the design of the software, the the marketing, the branding, even the keynote events, like how Lei Jin, the RCO, walks on the stage, it's the same way Steve Jobs did.
33:19
SPEAKER_00: They copied everything, but for half the price.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the phone was really good.
33:25
SPEAKER_00: It still is.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: The fun thing is now, Apple wanted to do a car.
33:30
SPEAKER_00: They never made it.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: Because they saw the competition at China, I think.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: And Xiaomi did make the car.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: So now you walk into a Xiaomi store in China, you see the phones, the laptops, they even make fridges and air conditioning units and washing machines.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: But you also see the car in the in the Xiaomi store.
33:46
SPEAKER_00: And the Xiaomi store, like design design-wise, it looks like an Apple store.
33:49
SPEAKER_02: Do you do you have the Xiaomi app?
33:52
SPEAKER_02: Uh it's one of the funnest things to do.
33:55
SPEAKER_02: I have the app for about four years now, and just looking at the app every two to three weeks, there's new products on there.
34:02
SPEAKER_02: It's it's insane.
34:04
SPEAKER_00: It's insane.
34:05
SPEAKER_00: It's crazy, but uh the fun thing is like if you look at Xiaomi the company, because I have a lot of Xiaomi products at home, like the rice cooker.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: If you look at Xiaomi the company, especially the way they started, it was more like an investor than an electronics manufacturer.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: They just, oh yeah, we see a cool uh factory that can make nice rice cookers.
34:25
SPEAKER_00: We will license you our brand, we will tell you how to design it, we will tell you how the the software works.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: We we will design the software for you, but you make the rice cooker.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: So they never had to invest in the infrastructure, they just did the branding part really well and the software part really well.
34:39
SPEAKER_00: So they're more a they are really a tech company.
34:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
34:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
34:44
SPEAKER_02: I have uh a couple uh automatic cat uh food dispensers and stuff.
34:48
SPEAKER_02: They have all kinds of things.
34:50
SPEAKER_02: It's it's really cool.
34:51
SPEAKER_02: I have the vacuum cleaner, the robot vacuum.
34:54
SPEAKER_02: It's insane.
34:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but I agree that I think it's pretty well known that competition in China is like nowhere else.
35:00
SPEAKER_02: It's it's ruthless, it's extremely fast-paced, and if you don't innovate, you die.
35:05
SPEAKER_02: Now and it's and it's humble, it's really humble.
35:08
SPEAKER_00: So we we went to the Xiaomi factory for the car, and they say, Yeah, we yeah, we have the 200,000 people and a thousand cars a day.
35:15
SPEAKER_00: They said, Yeah, we build this car factory in 180 days.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: We're not proud of that.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: Tesla Shanghai was built in 160 days, and so Xiaomi is always very open about where their competitor is better, like publicly.
35:31
SPEAKER_00: So even uh Xiaomi have has unveiled their they are building their own uh chips now, just like Apple with their H the M and the A chips.
35:41
SPEAKER_00: And they publicly say, Okay, we have designed our own chip, it gets built by TSMC, and uh yeah, we believe Apple is like 10 or 15% ahead in performance.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: They just publicly say that, but we are catching up because this is uh just our first design, and you see all of the Chinese companies being humble towards like the competition, they are proud to be able to compete.
36:02
SPEAKER_02: That's pretty beautiful, and uh it's one of the things I look for in management as an investor, just to be open, just just say it the way it is, you know.
36:11
SPEAKER_02: Even if it hurts, even if it's bad, so we can just deal with it, you know.
36:17
SPEAKER_02: So I I quite like that.
36:18
SPEAKER_02: But as you know, as a as a true long-term retail investor, the competition does put me off personally.
36:25
SPEAKER_02: If I could choose as a as an investor to own a piece of a boring supermarket chain that I know will be here 10 years from now, just doing a steady 10 to 15 percent annually, or investing some fast-paced, innovative Chinese tech company that might be out of business three years from now.
36:43
SPEAKER_02: How do I find Chinese businesses that will last?
36:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the ones that will last usually have a big brand name.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: So the you have like uh Alibaba, you know, that that's not going anywhere anytime soon.
36:56
SPEAKER_00: JD, the same thing, they're doing this for 10, 15, even maybe even 20 years.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: Mei Tuan is like the just the takeaway from China.
37:04
SPEAKER_00: They are like everyone uses it, they're not getting disrupted next week because they if there's a disruptor on the horizon, they just copy it within two weeks.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: That that's what happens in China.
37:14
SPEAKER_00: So you have the big, like the like in the US, we have the Fang, in China you have the BET, or the Bata.
37:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it changes, it changes from time to time, like you add or subtract the company.
37:23
SPEAKER_00: That that's digital space is quite settled.
37:26
SPEAKER_00: So you have the big digital company, super asset-light, super profitable, a lot of cash on hand, from my opinion, quite undervalued compared to their US counterparts.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, yeah.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: Or the US ones are overvalued, depends on how you look at it.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: Both.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the Chinese tech companies, I believe, they're not going anywhere.
37:43
SPEAKER_00: You have the big infrastructure companies like CATL, they build the batteries.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter which car brand suffice, but they're only two or three big battery makers.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: And so if you look at it from an infrastructure ecosystem lens, it still works.
37:55
SPEAKER_00: So they they're not going anywhere anytime soon.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: And it's retail is different because where we see big old school retailers buying e-commerce companies, there's the other way around.
38:06
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, if you look, if you see oh they still have like 80 billion cash on hand, not going anywhere.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: The big like emerging markets in China, so you have like industry policy, that's how they call it.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: So that's how the government works together with industry.
38:21
SPEAKER_00: Like the last industry policy was renewable energy, sustainable cars.
38:26
SPEAKER_00: So that's why you see 650 car companies.
38:29
SPEAKER_00: Because everyone could get a license, there were 0% loans, subsidies.
38:33
SPEAKER_00: They would they wanted to create this market.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: The next market is agriculture and biotech.
38:40
SPEAKER_00: So biotech in China, you have a lot of companies doing amazing stuff, lots of VC money, but you don't know which one's gonna survive, just by the ETF, by all of them, and that's actually what uh we went to a few VCs in China, like big uh the Cinnovation Ventures, the one of Kaifu Lee from the AI Superpower Book.
38:58
SPEAKER_00: And one of the partners told us, like, okay, we believe autonomous driving is the next big thing, so uh yeah, we invest in all of them.
39:07
SPEAKER_00: So even the VCs, the venture capitalists, buy multiple startups that even compete with each other because they don't know which one's gonna survive.
39:16
SPEAKER_00: They say it's like a Colosseum, we look for the best gladiators, and the gladiators will find it out, and the ones that survive, we will merge the companies or we will let the companies buy each other out because they're shareholders, so they can demand that stuff.
39:30
SPEAKER_00: So it's a different way because when you look at Silicon Valley and the big VCs, they want to find the next Sam Altman, they want to create the next celebrity superstar, they want to create the huge unicorn.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but that's that's harder in China because the competition is so crazy.
39:45
SPEAKER_00: So you invest in all of them.
39:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh, we also went to like a biotech company, Xtel Pi, also stock traded.
39:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh was really impressive.
39:53
SPEAKER_00: Like, you walk into the the office, a thousand like automated laboratory robots doing the tests all day.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: They get AI coordinates what they do, they do all the lap tabs automated, uh lab tests automated.
40:07
SPEAKER_00: Their customers are Pfizer, Lily, AstraZeneca, and very cool, but yeah, for them, 10 different ones that maybe do the same thing or maybe a little bit different.
40:20
SPEAKER_00: So, because it's a new market and because it's so quick, you buy you just buy more of them, you buy the whole portfolio.
40:28
SPEAKER_02: Do you think for outsiders, people not having been to China or living there should invest in Chinese companies either through ETFs or individual businesses, or do you think you kind of have to go there and understand the culture?
40:43
SPEAKER_02: Or uh what do you think?
40:45
SPEAKER_00: Depends on what you do.
40:46
SPEAKER_00: So if you believe like in the broader trend, like oh yeah, China's gonna at some point replace the US, what are they doing now?
40:52
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, they're creating the bricks, they don't want to trade in the US dollar anymore, so they want to make the dollar less dominant.
40:58
SPEAKER_00: And that's a big thing because yeah, I think there's a 20% inflation on the US dollar because developing countries are using it.
41:04
SPEAKER_00: If you remove the demand, it's gonna be a big problem for the US.
41:08
SPEAKER_00: So China is doing that game.
41:10
SPEAKER_00: So on the long term, if you believe in China on the long term, like okay, this is a good hedge against like the SP 500, that's an interesting play, but then just buy the ETF.
41:22
SPEAKER_00: And for me personally, I go like into the tech companies because I'm a tech nerd, I don't care that much about China construction company, but maybe if that's your cup of tea, that's also interesting because like the Chinese construction companies are doing a lot of the projects in the global south, so for Brazil, for uh Indonesia, for Africa, so they're creating that market, so that's very interesting.
41:46
SPEAKER_00: So it's like the whole China or Asia ETF part is okay, do I believe that the West will lose its dominance?
41:54
SPEAKER_00: So if you believe that, that's a good play because comparatively they are undervalued, they are all highly profitable, all cash-rich, the whole financial ecosystem, especially in China, is way less developed than in the US.
42:08
SPEAKER_00: Like the pension funds, the big institutional investors.
42:11
SPEAKER_00: So it's it's less developed there, so that you have more crazy swings.
42:16
SPEAKER_00: And if you look at specific companies, uh, yeah, then it's harder.
42:20
SPEAKER_00: Then you need to really understand, okay, what the hell are they doing?
42:23
SPEAKER_00: How is their competition in China?
42:25
SPEAKER_00: How fast are they in China?
42:26
SPEAKER_00: So you need to understand, maybe go there on holiday.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: So that that's that's the that's actually the most easy step one.
42:34
SPEAKER_00: Go there on holiday for a week or two, check it out, see how the Chinese people live, see how digital it is.
42:40
SPEAKER_00: Like, okay, Shen Chen depends on what you want to do.
42:43
SPEAKER_00: So I think for holidays, Shanghai is way way more fun.
42:47
SPEAKER_00: More to do, nicer, more international.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: Sunsen is like really high-tech, Silicon Valley, like, and China's super big.
42:54
SPEAKER_00: So if you think, oh yeah, I want to buy BYD stock, if you go to the Shanghai, you don't see you see BYD, but not 10, 15, 20% on the cars on the street is a BYD.
43:04
SPEAKER_00: If you go to Sunzun, where the headquarters of BYD are, like almost everything on the road is a BYD.
43:10
SPEAKER_00: So if you think, oh shit, BYD is doing really well, yeah, it depends on which city you are, because China is big.
43:14
SPEAKER_00: That's see multiple cities.
43:16
SPEAKER_00: Also go outside of the big cities, because you have like the A-tier cities like Sunsen and Shanghai.
43:21
SPEAKER_00: Those are super high-tech, super modern, super clean.
43:24
SPEAKER_00: You will, when you go to a city like Shanghai or Sunsen, you will think that Europe is the developing country.
43:31
SPEAKER_00: For sure.
43:32
SPEAKER_00: Because everything is super clean, super safe, super modern, super nice, the roads are silent because everything is electric.
43:39
SPEAKER_00: You will come back and think Europe is the developing country.
43:42
SPEAKER_00: Go outside of the big cities, so you go to like a B tier city, so that's like the head city of a province.
43:50
SPEAKER_00: Those are, depending on which province you are, quite high tech or less high tech.
43:54
SPEAKER_00: So if you go to Hangzhou, where the head office of Alibaba is, yeah, that's super nice.
43:58
SPEAKER_00: Then you then you will still think Europe.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: A developing country, go to a C tier city, a smaller city, then it will change a bit.
44:04
SPEAKER_00: But it's also harder as a tourist because no one speaks English anymore.
44:07
SPEAKER_00: But everything is still quite modern, safe, nice.
44:10
SPEAKER_00: You can more go into nature.
44:12
SPEAKER_00: You will see that wherever you are, even if you're on the top of a mountain or in a city or in the subway, because of Huawei 5G, connection is not a problem.
44:23
SPEAKER_00: It's crazy.
44:23
SPEAKER_00: You will have the high-speed trains because China has more than 50,000 kilometers of high-speed trains.
44:28
SPEAKER_00: So wherever you want to go, there is a high-speed train.
44:31
SPEAKER_00: And it's super nice, super affordable.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: You can order food in the trains.
44:36
SPEAKER_00: You can order food in trains online, and it's the food that gets delivered in the next station.
44:41
SPEAKER_00: So you can order the food from the restaurants in the next station, you're gonna stop.
44:46
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you told me this story during the uh the conference that um people go out to eat to uh to a restaurant and they don't have any nice desserts and they just order the desserts somewhere else and they bring it on like an electric scooter and you eat at the rest.
45:01
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this would not be allowed in in Europe in a in a restaurant, right?
45:05
SPEAKER_00: The restaurant owner will hit you.
45:07
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
45:08
SPEAKER_00: But if you if you like that's a cool example because Maitwan is the largest food delivery platform that that's the Uber yeats of China, they do I think 60 million meals a day.
45:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's you can see this happen.
45:24
SPEAKER_00: You see this happen on the street because you see all the guys riding around with the yellow bikes, you see people like me ordering dessert for a different restaurant.
45:33
SPEAKER_00: Then you understand, oh now I understand how they do 60 million meals a day because everyone is using it.
45:39
SPEAKER_00: That's the crazy part.
45:41
SPEAKER_00: Uh so then then you start to understand that company.
45:44
SPEAKER_00: And for me, like I do the trips with the founders, CEOs, investors, I do a few trips a year to China, I take them with us.
45:51
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh yeah, one of them got diarrhea because of the food.
45:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay, we need to order medicine.
45:56
SPEAKER_00: I grab the Maituan app, I order some medicine from the nearby drugstore, and within 15 minutes, there's a guy on my table with the medicine.
46:05
SPEAKER_00: Then you understand, okay, Maitwan is a quite a cool company.
46:08
SPEAKER_00: No one does this like this.
46:09
SPEAKER_00: The people are getting paid, I think, 1200 euros a month on average, if you work well hard enough.
46:14
SPEAKER_00: Gig economy is a thing in China.
46:17
SPEAKER_00: Uh the government they they intervened because it was the pay the wages went too low.
46:22
SPEAKER_00: So there's now like a minimum pay required by the governments from the food delivery platforms to the delivery drivers.
46:28
SPEAKER_00: It happened a few years ago, so you can see in the Maidwan stock when that happened.
46:32
SPEAKER_00: Because investors were thinking, oh shit.
46:34
SPEAKER_00: But it it I think it recovered quite okay.
46:35
SPEAKER_00: And when you travel in China, you you use trip.com.
46:38
SPEAKER_00: Booking is not relevant there.
46:40
SPEAKER_00: You use trip.com, and when you use trip.com you'll notice, wait a minute, booking is doing quite a lousy job in in user experience.
46:49
SPEAKER_00: Trip.com has their cool AI agent helping you book the trips.
46:53
SPEAKER_00: They have you can do way more, you can do the food tourist attraction, the train tickets.
46:58
SPEAKER_00: So they have a bigger portfolio of services.
47:00
SPEAKER_00: And booking is in Asia, of in Europe and the Western part quite big.
47:03
SPEAKER_00: But if Chinese tourists go to Europe on holiday, they use less trip, more booking, because booking has more hotels.
47:10
SPEAKER_00: But then I learned Trip said, okay, but our next phase is expanding internationally.
47:16
SPEAKER_00: We want to do more Europe, we want to do more US.
47:20
SPEAKER_00: But then, yeah, booking is here quite dominant.
47:23
SPEAKER_00: But then someone there told me every year, 300 million Chinese people go abroad.
47:30
SPEAKER_00: Like 300 million Chinese people, that's almost whole of Europe.
47:34
SPEAKER_00: And if they can use trip when they book their holiday to Europe, they will use trip.
47:40
SPEAKER_00: That's the biggest threat for a company like booking.
47:43
SPEAKER_00: So understanding things like this is quite interesting, strategy-wise, but also demographic-wise, because it's a big market.
47:51
SPEAKER_00: And even a trip saying I'm going international will affect a company like booking.
47:58
SPEAKER_02: Like a good company can still be a bad investment, right?
48:01
SPEAKER_02: Like Alibaba is a great company, it's very powerful and dominant still, but as an investment, it's been pretty pretty bad.
48:09
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
48:10
SPEAKER_02: So maybe just for reference, and you don't have to share the companies you own if you don't want to.
48:16
SPEAKER_02: But could you give us like three examples of companies you think are interesting to look at?
48:22
SPEAKER_02: Potentially high-quality companies.
48:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so one I was always very fond of was uh Pindor, is the mother company of Timu.
48:32
SPEAKER_00: Especially when they have big dips because it's quite a volatile stock, but it's cash-rich, asset-light, growing heavily because they have a good strategic gap in the West.
48:44
SPEAKER_00: They have quite a lot of politics political headwind, but they are super agile and quick because they don't have assets.
48:50
SPEAKER_00: So it's uh it's like an Airbnb with but for e-commerce.
48:54
SPEAKER_00: Like that's how you can you how you can see it.
48:56
SPEAKER_00: And their PE is under 14.
49:00
SPEAKER_00: I think back in the last dip it was nine.
49:02
SPEAKER_00: Ahold though, has the big supermarket chain where all the pension funds go in for dividends, has a PE of 15.
49:10
SPEAKER_00: How can an asset-like tech company have a low has a lower PE than uh old school safe supermarket chain investment?
49:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's 12 now.
49:19
SPEAKER_00: It's 12, yeah.
49:20
SPEAKER_00: So it's it's I bought at 9, so I think that's one that's still interesting.
49:25
SPEAKER_00: They have quite a headwind in China, they have headwind in Europe, but like their GMV, so the gross merchant their their revenue, the gross merchandising value for Europe and the US next year.
49:36
SPEAKER_00: Their target is to double the revenue.
49:40
SPEAKER_00: They go from 30 billion to 60 billion or something.
49:42
SPEAKER_00: It's that that's and I see them doing it because.
49:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
49:47
SPEAKER_00: Good pricing, they're increasing their quality, they have the funds to do it.
49:51
SPEAKER_00: JD is coming as well, so the competition is getting fiercer.
49:54
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, they became number two in the West in two years.
49:57
SPEAKER_00: They became number three in China within three years, so it's it's an interesting company to watch.
50:02
SPEAKER_00: Also, I have it as well.
50:03
SPEAKER_00: Trip for the same reasons I told you with booking.
50:06
SPEAKER_00: Trip is not as attractively priced as a Pinduador.
50:11
SPEAKER_00: I think it's compared to booking, it's it's compared to booking is fairly cheap, doesn't mean it's a good value, but compared to booking is cheap.
50:18
SPEAKER_00: PE of 10.
50:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and cash rich.
50:24
SPEAKER_02: Man, they grew revenue over the past 10 years, a kegger of 20%.
50:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's with a lot of Chinese companies.
50:32
SPEAKER_02: Insane.
50:33
SPEAKER_00: And uh Xiaomi, I think Xiaomi is still interesting because of their car business.
50:37
SPEAKER_00: Uh, because they are the only company, together with Huawei, that can build the whole ecosystem from consumer devices to wearable devices to home devices to the car.
50:49
SPEAKER_00: They're the only ones.
50:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh their car business is getting profitable.
50:54
SPEAKER_00: I think one and a half year ago they lost like$3,000 per car.
50:59
SPEAKER_00: Uh, currently it's zero.
51:00
SPEAKER_00: So they made it profitable.
51:02
SPEAKER_00: So that's super quick for a car company.
51:06
SPEAKER_00: And they used they leveraged the ecosystem of the other products.
51:09
SPEAKER_00: You see car brands in China like bringing competitors out for the Xiaomi car, no one's interested.
51:14
SPEAKER_00: 2027, they will launch their cars in Europe.
51:16
SPEAKER_00: And if you are already a Xiaomi fan of the Xiaomi phones and your vacuum cleaner and cat stuff, you will be interested in the car.
51:23
SPEAKER_00: I bet.
51:24
SPEAKER_02: Uh I'll if I can afford it, I I might, but uh, I'm I might be buying Xiaomi stock then instead.
51:30
SPEAKER_00: Uh the cars, the cars are cheap, they compete with Tesla on pricing.
51:34
SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's pretty good.
51:35
SPEAKER_00: And they have like the so the SU7 is their model three, starting in China from 25,000 euros.
51:41
SPEAKER_00: In China, every electric car is half the price, even the German ones.
51:45
SPEAKER_00: Uh so starting from 25, I think in Europe due to terrorists, it will be like 40,000, 45.
51:50
SPEAKER_00: That's the starting model, 400 horsepower, 600 kilometers of range.
51:55
SPEAKER_00: And then you have the their top-end model, 1200 horsepower, 70,000 euros.
52:03
SPEAKER_00: Carbon ceramic brakes, carbon roof, carbon spoilers.
52:08
SPEAKER_00: They are pricing their cars like their phones.
52:10
SPEAKER_00: I don't like spending money, John.
52:12
SPEAKER_02: I uh I like it.
52:14
SPEAKER_02: It's very frugal.
52:15
SPEAKER_02: If I can get the cheap coffee or the cheap drinks, I'll I'll do that over the premium drinks.
52:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so Xiaomi, I think it's interesting.
52:22
SPEAKER_00: BYD, I also still think it's interesting because they are growing, they want to become the number one car in volume.
52:30
SPEAKER_00: They make profits, they are also they have a big battery business, they sell their batteries to Tesla.
52:35
SPEAKER_00: So if you drive a Tesla Model 3 or Model Y uh that came out out of the Shanghai factory, it has a BYD battery.
52:42
SPEAKER_00: That's around 60% of all Teslas.
52:44
SPEAKER_00: So that's crazy.
52:46
SPEAKER_00: So they say they they still have their battery business, so they also sell their batteries to Xiaomi.
52:50
SPEAKER_00: So that's super interesting.
52:51
SPEAKER_00: They have their car brands.
52:53
SPEAKER_00: I think internationally they're growing the quickest.
52:55
SPEAKER_00: They are building factories like crazy.
52:56
SPEAKER_00: So their Hungary factory is finished.
53:00
SPEAKER_00: They will start building cars in Hungary, so no tariffs for them.
53:04
SPEAKER_00: They have a Brazil factory, they have a Malaysia factory, a Thailand factory, so it's it's growing aggressively.
53:10
SPEAKER_00: One caveat is that in China they have quite a lot of headwind, so they are the number one, but Gili, the Gili Group, that's the owner of Volvo, Polestar, Lincoln Co., and Zeker, is making quite a good growth leap.
53:24
SPEAKER_00: And the same can be said for Leap Motor.
53:27
SPEAKER_00: The Leap Motor is partly owned by the Stellantes group.
53:30
SPEAKER_00: So you see a lot of Western companies now investing the Chinese cars because yeah, if you can't beat them, join them.
53:36
SPEAKER_00: The dynamic is really broad.
53:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, BYD is just too big to fill.
53:43
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, look at the wait for a right point to buy them.
53:48
SPEAKER_00: I think what's the PE now?
53:49
SPEAKER_00: 30 or 40?
53:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh 21.
53:52
SPEAKER_00: 21.
53:53
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, yeah.
53:54
SPEAKER_00: So the price dropped quite a bit.
53:56
SPEAKER_00: And I also think jd.com, the company that's buying media marks, they are also expanding internationally quite aggressively.
54:03
SPEAKER_00: They are super asset heavy, they are extremely vertically integrated.
54:08
SPEAKER_00: But I also if you compare them to a Walmart or a Best Buy or an Ault, still I think still a good deal.
54:13
SPEAKER_00: They're quite low now, and I think they can make media markets profitable within one year.
54:19
SPEAKER_00: Be just because of the purchasing volume they have in China.
54:25
SPEAKER_00: But MediaMarkt will just be a small part of their revenue.
54:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's the hard part about these acquisitions and biotech in general.
54:31
SPEAKER_00: But I still need to find a good biotech China ETF, it doesn't exist.
54:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's something I don't really touch.
54:37
SPEAKER_02: It's uh out of my circle of competence.
54:40
SPEAKER_02: But it it is, I believe the Netherlands is really good at biotech as well, so they should definitely collaborate on.
54:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure, for sure.
54:47
SPEAKER_00: And I think uh yeah, so so you'll have uh I think that most of the next generation cancer therapy comes from the Chinese market, but by Western companies like Pfizer and AstraZeneca, they they're developing them, but in their Chinese RD labs, together with Chinese biotech companies.
55:03
SPEAKER_00: So you have you have different types of biotech companies, you have biotech companies like Galapagos developing their own stuff, their own medicine, their own proteins.
55:13
SPEAKER_00: But you also have biotech companies building technology to help the medicine companies.
55:18
SPEAKER_00: I see, yeah.
55:19
SPEAKER_00: So that's those are that are really tech biotech tech companies.
55:23
SPEAKER_00: So those are also they have you have a lot of them in China.
55:26
SPEAKER_00: Those are also interesting because they will accelerate classical biotech companies, but they don't have the risk of like getting to clinical trial and stuff like that.
55:34
SPEAKER_02: So I I haven't heard you talk about Tencent at all.
55:37
SPEAKER_02: It's uh one of the companies I own personally.
55:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
55:40
SPEAKER_02: What's your view on Tencent?
55:41
SPEAKER_02: Do you think it's still it could still be from all the research I've done, it's perhaps the most powerful company in China.
55:49
SPEAKER_02: It's it like it has this ecosystem that you can't really live without.
55:53
SPEAKER_02: But what's your uh opinion on Tencent?
55:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Tencent, I've visited them multiple times, they are huge.
56:00
SPEAKER_00: It's it's uh I also have their stock.
56:04
SPEAKER_00: If you buy any China ETF, I think 10 or 15% will be Tencent in the in that ETF.
56:10
SPEAKER_00: And Tencent is yeah, it's it's it's one of the big ones.
56:13
SPEAKER_00: It's it's you need to combine Meta, uh Netflix, Spotify, all of them together at the gaming companies, EA games, to create something that's compar even comparable to Tencent.
56:24
SPEAKER_00: So they're extremely big, too big to fail.
56:27
SPEAKER_00: Actually, they are super innovative, great people working there.
56:31
SPEAKER_00: They're also expanding their offerings in in the West because they're the biggest gaming company in the world.
56:35
SPEAKER_00: So I think it's so I have them somewhere.
56:38
SPEAKER_00: I think they're quite so good, they're quite boring.
56:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I know, and their value doesn't get reflected in their stock.
56:46
SPEAKER_00: So I'm it's a pity, and I don't think that will change anytime soon.
56:50
SPEAKER_00: Because I talked back then I caught talked to someone from Crane Shares.
56:54
SPEAKER_00: Crane shares, they built China ETFs, all ex-BlackRock employees, and uh one of those guys he visited the I think the chief investment officer he visited the CFO of Tencent because they have quite a lot of Tencent stock.
57:08
SPEAKER_00: And the CFO asked, like, yeah, why am I not even compared to a Meta?
57:13
SPEAKER_00: Tencent is not on the same like valuation like a Meta, if you uh take the same ratios.
57:19
SPEAKER_00: So why is that?
57:20
SPEAKER_00: I even pay dividends.
57:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's because of you because you're Chinese.
57:25
SPEAKER_00: So that's the big problem.
57:26
SPEAKER_00: It's it's maybe too Chinese.
57:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and and that's a pity because I I think they should be valued higher.
57:34
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you can look at it this way, but at the same time, this allows us to increase our stake over time by being cheap.
57:40
SPEAKER_02: So it doesn't matter, right?
57:42
SPEAKER_02: If you're uh looking at the U.S.
57:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for the long term, yeah, yeah.
57:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so for the long term, if the dollar becomes less valuable, if the weight of the US of if of Wall Street becomes smaller, then Tencent will eventually rise together with the rest of China, because Tencent is such a heavyweight.
57:57
SPEAKER_00: Also, what you see is last few years it was all about de-risking, especially from the Chinese financial assets.
58:03
SPEAKER_00: So pension funds, institution investors all dumped their Chinese stock.
58:06
SPEAKER_00: So I think one or two years ago the point was okay, now there's just nobody left to sell.
58:12
SPEAKER_00: For as retail investors, great point to step in.
58:15
SPEAKER_00: Now with Trump, you see people de-risking from the US a bit.
58:18
SPEAKER_00: So going into the Chinese stock.
58:19
SPEAKER_00: So if for the last two years, I think if you have just bought a China MSCI ETF, you you've got 20% a year just because the institutional investors came back.
58:28
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, every monkey could make money.
58:32
SPEAKER_00: And the situation is now less a little bit less crazy like that.
58:39
SPEAKER_00: Sensitive.
58:40
SPEAKER_00: So you need to be more mindful about the picks.
58:44
SPEAKER_00: Uh yes, I'm still bullish about the Chinese technology product because you have in China it's a big country, it's super diverse.
58:51
SPEAKER_00: So you have the big technology, great talent, lots of money, but you also have like the old school business that's still there, that's also there.
59:00
SPEAKER_02: So it's both true.
59:02
SPEAKER_02: So, our community, and a lot many of our listeners are fascinated by the semiconductor industry, especially what's happening with AI and open AI and the bubble talks and NVIDIA and TSMC during the investor day.
59:17
SPEAKER_02: I think you said something close to that China's getting pretty close to making its own like uh chip machines or uh designs.
59:26
SPEAKER_02: So I'm just curious, where do you think China realistically stands in the semiconductor industry today?
59:33
SPEAKER_02: Is it much closer to the West than we think, or are they further ahead than we think?
59:39
SPEAKER_02: Or just uh would love to hear some of your thoughts here.
59:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so the semiconductor industry is a broad definition.
59:47
SPEAKER_00: Because you have the ultra ultra high tech, so that's the the 5 nanometers and below, so that's the TSMC, ASML, EUV machine game.
59:58
SPEAKER_00: And you have like all the other legacy chips we need.
1:00:02
SPEAKER_00: The things that Nexperia is building, the the boring power conversion chips and whatever we need, memory chips, and China.
1:00:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we saw with Nexperia the the chip packaging habit in China.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, China's had export ban, and then all the car brand car factories had had a big problem almost shutting down.
1:00:22
SPEAKER_00: And the interesting part is like if you look at the legacy part, everything like 20 nanometers and above, all the chips we need in our washing machines, microwaves, cars, memory sticks, whatever, China have has more than 70% of that market.
1:00:39
SPEAKER_00: That's the stuff we also need in our lives, and maybe even more so.
1:00:45
SPEAKER_00: And we saw this with Nexperia.
1:00:47
SPEAKER_00: So if you look at that part of the semiconductor industry, and mostly still used by the DUV machines of ASML, China has that market.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_00: It's not in Europe, it's not in the US, it's not in Taiwan, it's in China.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_00: And if you look at the ultra-high-tech, so if you want to do semiconductors as Europe, for instance, that's what we want now, you need to have the whole industry, the whole supply chain.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_00: So you have a we have ASML, but you need like ASML has 2,000 suppliers, and TSMC has like 20,000 more.
1:01:17
SPEAKER_00: You need everything to be able to create a chip, it's not only ASML.
1:01:23
SPEAKER_00: And you see China investing, I think, 300 billion a year, that's like a whole ASML year, to create that whole ecosystem, and they have big parts of that ecosystem.
1:01:33
SPEAKER_00: The one part they don't have is that UV machine of ASML.
1:01:37
SPEAKER_00: That's where they're investing a lot now.
1:01:39
SPEAKER_00: So there are papers about Huawei having their own new UV source on a different technology not patented by ASML.
1:01:49
SPEAKER_00: They say in China that it will be operational next year, somewhere Q1, Q2, their new UV source.
1:01:57
SPEAKER_00: The problem is how quickly can they scale this?
1:01:59
SPEAKER_00: If Huawei is able to skill this quickly, then China can build their own like sub-5 nanomated chips.
1:02:07
SPEAKER_00: It's that will be a big headache for ASML, uh, big headache for the US, because wait, we blocked China and now they have their own substitution.
1:02:14
SPEAKER_00: What they also say in Chinese social media is it's a matter of time.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_00: These machines are created by people, not by God.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_00: And when you look at it from that point, oh yeah, China was always blocked from entering the International Space Station.
1:02:30
SPEAKER_00: 20 years later, they have their own space station, more high-tech than the US, Russian one, and yeah, the one currently floating around from the US will be deprecated in a few years.
1:02:39
SPEAKER_00: And then the West won't have a space station anymore, and China has their own.
1:02:42
SPEAKER_00: And the Americans are not allowed, and every instruction is in Chinese.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_00: So it's it's a very complex, broad thing with the semiconductors, because if you look at the low-tech part, so they have everything.
1:02:55
SPEAKER_00: Still need ASML machines, though, but yeah, they can get the DOV machines, so they say, okay, we just own that market.
1:03:00
SPEAKER_00: And then for the EOV part, yeah.
1:03:02
SPEAKER_00: It's a matter of time they will have it.
1:03:05
SPEAKER_00: Of course, ASML is going through, uh still innovating, but yeah, at some point they at some point there will be a competitor, also for the high-end chips.
1:03:15
SPEAKER_02: Do you worry about uh a potential China-Taiwan escalation?
1:03:20
SPEAKER_02: Is that something you think about when you're investing, or do you think it's likely or not?
1:03:25
SPEAKER_02: Or is it overblown?
1:03:27
SPEAKER_00: I think it's overblown.
1:03:28
SPEAKER_00: Of course, it's it's a risk somewhere.
1:03:30
SPEAKER_00: I think if China really invades in Taiwan, I also need to find another job as keynote speaker.
1:03:35
SPEAKER_00: So I also need a plan B.
1:03:37
SPEAKER_00: Always have a plan B.
1:03:38
SPEAKER_00: But the fun thing is like what I really think, but it's it's not like academically backed up or something.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_00: But if you look at Hong Kong, so the UK gave Hong Kong back to China.
1:03:49
SPEAKER_00: At the point when they gave back, China was so really poor.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_00: Hong Kong was fairly developed, the big financial center of Asia.
1:03:55
SPEAKER_00: And all the Hong Kong people were thinking, look, I don't I'm not Chinese, I don't want to be Chinese, don't compare me with those filthy people.
1:04:02
SPEAKER_00: That was the average Hong Kongese back then.
1:04:04
SPEAKER_00: What China did was okay, Hong Kong is the entrance for Western companies to China.
1:04:09
SPEAKER_00: What will we do?
1:04:10
SPEAKER_00: We will develop the Greater Bay Area.
1:04:11
SPEAKER_00: So Sun was Sensen was still the fishing village, and within 20 years, it's like the big Silicon Valley of China.
1:04:18
SPEAKER_00: So if Sunsen, Kwangdong, the the whole the they surrounded Hong Kong with high-tech.
1:04:25
SPEAKER_00: So Hong Kong currently is just a lot of financial companies.
1:04:29
SPEAKER_00: Uh so uh they it's it's the way a way for Chinese companies to go to the stock market, the Hong Kong Exchange.
1:04:37
SPEAKER_00: But that's about it.
1:04:38
SPEAKER_00: There is not really high-tech companies in Hong Kong.
1:04:40
SPEAKER_00: So if you are, for instance, my nephew, he's he he had a he has a degree in uh UX design.
1:04:46
SPEAKER_00: There are not many companies.
1:04:48
SPEAKER_00: There's no company in Hong Kong which I can work for.
1:04:50
SPEAKER_00: Only Chinese ones.
1:04:52
SPEAKER_00: So they made Hong Kong less relevant.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_00: They also opened quite a lot of free trade zones around Hong Kong in Shanghai as well, so companies could put their stock there, not paying import tax.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, Hong Kong became less attractive, less relevant.
1:05:07
SPEAKER_00: It's still like on paper a financial gateway to the world.
1:05:13
SPEAKER_00: And what you see now is currently in the weekends, people a lot of Hong Kongese people going to Sintun for a weekend away because it's nice, it's clean, we go to the spa, we go for nice food, we don't go to Karigoki, they go to holiday in China for a few days.
1:05:25
SPEAKER_00: It used to be the other way around.
1:05:28
SPEAKER_00: And if China will be successful in building their own high-tech semiconductor industry with uh SMIC and a few other companies, at some point they will just make Taiwan less relevant.
1:05:42
SPEAKER_00: That's one way to do it.
1:05:44
SPEAKER_00: And with you can do the same Hong Kong game, and within ten or twenty years, if Taiwan's economy is doing bad, if people are not happy anymore, then China can be the big savior.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_00: That's another way to do it.
1:05:59
SPEAKER_00: And then No one in the world will care anymore.
1:06:03
SPEAKER_00: Because the US has their own TSMC factories, Europe will have their own semiconductor factories.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_00: At that point, no one will care about Taiwan anymore.
1:06:12
SPEAKER_00: It's a bit sad, but yeah, if Trump has their own Arizona if his Arizona factory is building the most high-tech ships, I think it's a big liability for Taiwan.
1:06:23
SPEAKER_02: Because they're not dependent on a single place anymore?
1:06:26
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:06:27
SPEAKER_00: Because Taiwan is now precious because oh yeah, I Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, they all depend on the Taiwanese factories.
1:06:34
SPEAKER_00: But if that factory is in the US.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:06:39
SPEAKER_02: Who cares then, right?
1:06:41
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:06:42
SPEAKER_02: What is the main difference, you think, between Chinese AI and Western AI?
1:06:48
SPEAKER_00: Big difference.
1:06:49
SPEAKER_00: So in the US, everyone goes for AGI, super intelligence.
1:06:53
SPEAKER_00: We want to create the big online brain, and they want to replace all times of jobs.
1:06:58
SPEAKER_00: Usually the office jobs.
1:07:00
SPEAKER_00: And it's it's like a big yeah, so everyone is starting to see it maybe a bubble.
1:07:06
SPEAKER_00: The whole AI investment, circular investment thing.
1:07:09
SPEAKER_00: The Chinese comp and it's all closed source, mainly closed source in the US, apart from the meta labs.
1:07:16
SPEAKER_00: China has a total different response.
1:07:17
SPEAKER_00: So one is Digo open source.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_00: So Deep Seeks create a model open source.
1:07:21
SPEAKER_00: Quen creates a model from Alibaba, open source.
1:07:24
SPEAKER_00: Kimi model open source.
1:07:27
SPEAKER_00: It's crazy to think.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_00: The country that copied everyone at first now says, okay, here's my knowledge for free.
1:07:34
SPEAKER_00: Have fun.
1:07:36
SPEAKER_00: So at one point they say, okay, the business model of OpenAI, we will just make it less viable because our stuff is free.
1:07:43
SPEAKER_00: So that's a big risk for a company like OpenAI.
1:07:46
SPEAKER_00: So if you are a startup, you want to build an AI tool, and you can choose.
1:07:51
SPEAKER_00: I pay OpenAI 10,000 bucks a month, or I just get Deep Seek and Quen open source install it on my own servers.
1:08:00
SPEAKER_00: And it's open source, you can install it on your own servers, you can remove the government propaganda, you can just fine-tune it in your own way because it's that's the beauty of open source.
1:08:07
SPEAKER_00: There's no data going to China because it's your own freaking server.
1:08:10
SPEAKER_00: So that's that's one totally different way how that how they approach it.
1:08:14
SPEAKER_00: The reason why China goes open source is because they want wide-scale adoption.
1:08:18
SPEAKER_00: Because they know one company cannot create all the use cases.
1:08:22
SPEAKER_00: So we go open source, everyone can create real-world applications on their own.
1:08:27
SPEAKER_00: So the adoption, the way of adopting is different.
1:08:30
SPEAKER_00: They focus way more on.
1:08:32
SPEAKER_00: So we we want to replace the tax writers, the lawyers, the consultants, the free time managers, and the soft jobs.
1:08:41
SPEAKER_00: China has less of those soft jobs.
1:08:44
SPEAKER_00: So their focus is naturally less on those soft jobs and more on the hard things in the real world.
1:08:48
SPEAKER_00: So the dark factories, autonomous driving cars, delivery drones, uh what did I saw last time?
1:08:55
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, smart public toilets.
1:08:58
SPEAKER_00: They create real-world applications because they have more of those problems.
1:09:03
SPEAKER_00: So that's a fundamental different way they're doing it.
1:09:07
SPEAKER_00: What you should also think like, okay, you have Sam Altman creating OpenAI, they're burning billions of dollars every year.
1:09:13
SPEAKER_00: No one's knowing when they will be profitable.
1:09:16
SPEAKER_00: They're spending money that gets borrowed from someone else, from stock they don't even have, and and whatever, like everyone knows those stories.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_00: And then you have like a company like Alibaba, they're building Quen, they fund it with their very profitable retail and cloud business.
1:09:32
SPEAKER_00: People using Quen will probably use Alibaba cloud, so revenue comes back.
1:09:37
SPEAKER_00: So it's a more financially sustainable model.
1:09:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh then you have a company like DeepSeek, so DeepSeq, their mother company, is HiFlyer, a big hedge fund in China.
1:09:46
SPEAKER_00: DeepSeq was of course famous, they trained their model for 100 times less money.
1:09:50
SPEAKER_00: The running cost of their models is like 50 times less.
1:09:55
SPEAKER_00: It's extremely sustainably viable for the CEO of HiFlyer to fund DeepSeq.
1:10:00
SPEAKER_00: For him, it's pocket money.
1:10:02
SPEAKER_00: So DeepSeek will be financially sustainable for a long time.
1:10:08
SPEAKER_00: So that's a fundamental different way on how the Chinese AI companies are built.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_00: So, what does he get out of it by putting it on open source?
1:10:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so my uh my like fin crazy way of thinking is HiFlyer is a hedge fund.
1:10:25
SPEAKER_00: They earn billions of dollars by doing crazy stock bets.
1:10:30
SPEAKER_00: They had GPUs lying around to train their AI models for trading, and they said, okay, let's let's let's try the LM thing.
1:10:37
SPEAKER_00: We have the GPUs lying around, not not many GPUs, but we have quite a few GPUs.
1:10:41
SPEAKER_00: If you compare it to Amazon, it's not is nothing.
1:10:43
SPEAKER_00: Then they said, okay, we have uh office building at across the street, people get in there, some some talented students, PhDs, like not what Zuckerberg is like pulling the big heavyweights.
1:10:54
SPEAKER_00: Deep Seek was like just a group of basically a group of students, but very diverse.
1:10:58
SPEAKER_00: And let's see if you can create a model.
1:11:00
SPEAKER_00: And they had a very different approach because they saw oh, OpenAI is very inefficient in using their resources because they they had all the resources.
1:11:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh so but we have a fewer GPUs, but hey, we are all students, so we are very frugal.
1:11:12
SPEAKER_00: We knew how to know how to do frugal.
1:11:14
SPEAKER_00: So they created this model, and maybe what I like to think is that the CEO said, okay, we created this model for I think what it is, 26 million, uh 16 million euros or something.
1:11:27
SPEAKER_00: That that neighborhood.
1:11:29
SPEAKER_00: Let's short Nvidia first and then make it open source.
1:11:33
SPEAKER_00: Maybe.
1:11:35
SPEAKER_00: Good ROI, definitely, yeah.
1:11:39
SPEAKER_00: But like the but like that that's what I like to think.
1:11:42
SPEAKER_00: The real explanation was they used a lot of open source data to train the model, to create the model, and because they're students, their students rely on the open source community to do their projects.
1:11:53
SPEAKER_00: So they they trained their model on open source data from Meta, from Google, from from all different kinds of types of sources.
1:12:00
SPEAKER_00: So we created DeepSeek, their model with open source.
1:12:04
SPEAKER_00: So we wanted to give back to the open source.
1:12:06
SPEAKER_00: So that's the more romantic explanation.
1:12:08
SPEAKER_00: And for Alibaba, it's the same thing.
1:12:09
SPEAKER_00: They use open source, there's they create their models, their models are super performant, and they say we make it open source, but it runs better on our cloud infrastructure.
1:12:18
SPEAKER_00: So you come back to their cloud to do it.
1:12:23
SPEAKER_02: When you um look into the news, you said that we are very focused on like Western news filtered by the United States.
1:12:33
SPEAKER_02: The other side of the coin is that we can't really trust what's coming out of China.
1:12:39
SPEAKER_02: So, what kind of sources do you use when you look into what's happening in China?
1:12:44
SPEAKER_02: You go there, obviously, you talk to perhaps some of the management teams.
1:12:49
SPEAKER_02: Uh, I can uh imagine.
1:12:51
SPEAKER_02: But what kind of sources do you think are reliable?
1:12:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let me see.
1:12:56
SPEAKER_00: My new I have a newsletter inbox with all kinds of stuff.
1:12:59
SPEAKER_00: Uh, South China Morning Post.
1:13:01
SPEAKER_00: That's uh owned by Alibaba, we have to say that.
1:13:05
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but South China Morning Post is like the Wall Street Journal, which is also owned by Amazon or by Jet Bezos.
1:13:11
SPEAKER_00: But South China Morning Post is great, it's it's based in Hong Kong, uh, it's all in English, so really good content about what's happening in China because they also really interview the Chinese company, so that that's a really good one.
1:13:23
SPEAKER_00: A newsletter on Substack Sinosism, so S-I-N-O-C-I-S M.
1:13:29
SPEAKER_00: They were the first one reporting about Nexperia, way before Bloomberg, New York Times, F Day.
1:13:36
SPEAKER_00: So it's it's it was a Substack thing, so that's really fun.
1:13:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, so they are quite a if you if you do retail, the Brands Factory, Chinese sellers brands factory, also a Substack Dunn Insights, D-U-N-N for the car content.
1:13:53
SPEAKER_00: So it's uh Michael Dunn, the guy who worked in China for a long time for the car industry and now is back in the US, but makes his own uh car content.
1:14:02
SPEAKER_00: So that's really cool.
1:14:03
SPEAKER_00: A good friend of mine in Shanghai, he writes China Insights Weekly.
1:14:07
SPEAKER_00: It's a cool newsletter.
1:14:08
SPEAKER_00: Um let's see which ones we have more.
1:14:13
SPEAKER_00: Paking knowledge, also a substack.
1:14:16
SPEAKER_02: Can you send me some of these um after the conversation?
1:14:19
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:14:20
SPEAKER_02: And I'll make sure to put them in the show notes and uh some of them I'll everyone can subscribe, yeah.
1:14:26
SPEAKER_00: Some of them are more um geopolitical, but if you want to go into company stuff, like like I mentioned Crane shares, the ETF builders, or crane shares as like an ETF of a newsletter, really for the on the company side.
1:14:39
SPEAKER_00: Like when do they have financial results?
1:14:41
SPEAKER_00: How did Chinese people receive those financial results?
1:14:43
SPEAKER_00: What's their competition?
1:14:44
SPEAKER_00: So I think that's uh fits this audience really well.
1:14:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:14:51
SPEAKER_00: And my linked and my LinkedIn, of course.
1:14:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we'll definitely put that on top for sure.
1:14:56
SPEAKER_02: Besides, even if you're not interested in any of the China stuff, I mean the videos you're sharing with what they're doing over there is insane and so cool to just see what's happening.
1:15:08
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:15:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, it gets you like a small insight of what's happened there.
1:15:12
SPEAKER_00: And even if you don't have interest in the Chinese part, if you have like, yeah, you you have stock, you have companies, you need to know the Chinese competitors of the companies you have.
1:15:20
SPEAKER_00: Because most of them have a business in China or do RD in China or whatever.
1:15:25
SPEAKER_00: For instance, Renault, Renault Group, they had the new Renault Twingo.
1:15:31
SPEAKER_00: It was uh yeah.
1:15:33
SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of people liked it when they presented it.
1:15:37
SPEAKER_00: But they're not telling you it was developed in Renault Shanghai RD lab in two years.
1:15:43
SPEAKER_00: So they do it in China, and yeah, that's that's super interesting.
1:15:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh and even Nike or Adidas are losing, Puma are losing in China, but then you have their competitor, Anta.
1:15:53
SPEAKER_00: But Anta, I think, is willing to buy Puma.
1:15:58
SPEAKER_00: So you see Chinese companies buying the Western ones because yeah, if I have beaten you in China or uh Luck and Coffee beating Starbucks, and Luck and Coffee is opening shops in the US right now?
1:16:09
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, their growth is insane.
1:16:11
SPEAKER_02: I think they've opened like a couple thousands in just a couple of months.
1:16:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that's uh we call it China Speed.
1:16:17
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, China Speed, that's a good one.
1:16:19
SPEAKER_02: Do you think that's the trend that will continue?
1:16:21
SPEAKER_02: That um I wouldn't say Chinese consumers are becoming anti-Western, but do you think like the homegrown brands like Anta, maybe there there's others that are eventually like winning from Western brands?
1:16:35
SPEAKER_02: Is that a trend you see continuing?
1:16:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
1:16:38
SPEAKER_00: And it's not because they don't like American brands, because the American brands are still doing really well in China.
1:16:44
SPEAKER_00: So you have Lululemon, uh, the the Tesla is still a top five car seller, Apple is still top five or top three, hair mask is doing really well in China.
1:16:51
SPEAKER_00: So you still have a lot of Western brands are being very successful.
1:16:57
SPEAKER_00: The problem is for brands in China or companies in China, if your argument is I'm Nike, buy me because I'm American, that's not good enough anymore.
1:17:09
SPEAKER_00: That it hasn't been good enough for I think the last 10 years.
1:17:12
SPEAKER_00: It used to be good enough.
1:17:13
SPEAKER_00: Same with McDonald's, like I'm American, come eat at my place.
1:17:17
SPEAKER_00: McDonald's, you see still a lot of McDonald's in China, but they have to customize their offering.
1:17:21
SPEAKER_00: They have to customize for the Chinese consumer.
1:17:24
SPEAKER_00: So Anta is winning because they have they are very innovative.
1:17:28
SPEAKER_00: I have like running shoes for them with carbon plating, and they are still 120 euros, so it's not cheap.
1:17:34
SPEAKER_00: But they they have they are beating Nike on branding.
1:17:37
SPEAKER_00: They have better brand ambassadors, they are sponsoring like the Chinese Olympics, and the Chinese swimming team wears Anta jackets and they walk around like it's a fashion show on the on around the swimming pool.
1:17:47
SPEAKER_00: So the the jacket is going for 300 euros on Chinese on Chinese internet.
1:17:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh so people really want the jacket.
1:17:53
SPEAKER_00: So they do the marketing game really well.
1:17:56
SPEAKER_00: And and the marketing targeting to the Chinese consumer.
1:17:59
SPEAKER_00: So Nike has to step up their game if they want to reach the Chinese consumer.
1:18:05
SPEAKER_00: And Adi does currently has a new product line in China, so yeah, sports jackets, but with the Chinese classical buttons to close them.
1:18:14
SPEAKER_00: Those ones are going really viral because hey, Chinese people like that.
1:18:19
SPEAKER_02: So it's about um changing to local taste in China if you wanna stay relevant.
1:18:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and this needs to be done everywhere because with when Chinese companies go to the West, they also need to change.
1:18:32
SPEAKER_00: Because Chinese like for the cars, Chinese cars are tuned more softly.
1:18:36
SPEAKER_00: Western people like more firm cars, so yeah, you need to change the car for the local taste.
1:18:42
SPEAKER_00: So this is not this is not actually not China specific.
1:18:44
SPEAKER_00: This is just how do you build a global company with different types of consumers.
1:18:49
SPEAKER_02: What is something every investor should really understand about China over the next say decade?
1:18:58
SPEAKER_00: One thing is China is minding its own business.
1:19:04
SPEAKER_00: We like to think it's all about us, they want to get us, they want to do this to us, they want to do that to us.
1:19:10
SPEAKER_00: That's also what the media is writing.
1:19:11
SPEAKER_00: But China is mainly minding its own business because they have their own massive problems: population aging, low birth rates, pollution, energy project, they have solved energy, food problems, semiconductors.
1:19:23
SPEAKER_00: So they have a lot of their own problems to solve because it's a market of one and a half billion people.
1:19:28
SPEAKER_00: So it's all about themselves.
1:19:29
SPEAKER_00: So that that's we shouldn't worry too much about what they want to do to us.
1:19:36
SPEAKER_00: What's interesting about that is okay, China says, okay, we want to be we were the world leader.
1:19:42
SPEAKER_00: Always.
1:19:43
SPEAKER_00: It's only the last 200 years they lost.
1:19:45
SPEAKER_00: They missed the industrial revolution, the second world war, but China was always the world leader economically for the last two, three thousand years or something.
1:19:54
SPEAKER_00: So for them, it's just becoming back into the number one position.
1:20:00
SPEAKER_00: And what does that mean for us as investors as Europeans?
1:20:03
SPEAKER_00: So, one thing what they want to do is make the dollar, the US dollar, less relevant.
1:20:08
SPEAKER_00: And we have to think about, especially if you want to keep stock for the next decade, what happens to our stock, our American companies, when the dollar gets less relevant?
1:20:17
SPEAKER_00: What happens if the global south, so China is investing a lot in Africa, in Southeast South America, Southeast Asia.
1:20:26
SPEAKER_00: What happens if those countries become more wealthy and don't trade in the US dollar?
1:20:32
SPEAKER_00: That's what we should take into mind, uh, because that's what China wants to develop.
1:20:36
SPEAKER_00: They want to make the Western dominance less dominant.
1:20:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and what's also interesting is China wants Europe to be stronger.
1:20:46
SPEAKER_00: China has an incentive to make Europe stronger because when Europe is stronger, America is weaker.
1:20:53
SPEAKER_00: We are Europeans don't want to accept this.
1:20:55
SPEAKER_00: We don't get this yet.
1:20:56
SPEAKER_00: We still think they want to get us.
1:20:58
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, for the next 10 years, we should watch the global south, what China's doing with the BRIC countries, when are they moving away from the US dollar?
1:21:05
SPEAKER_00: They are buying huge amounts of gold, so they're creating their own digital currency.
1:21:09
SPEAKER_00: What's yeah, we see now that like the the Americ if if you buy like the world MSCI ETF, the American stock is super dominant in that, especially the tech, the tech stock.
1:21:20
SPEAKER_00: But I think that will change just because China wants to make the US less relevant, and not by making the US weaker, but making the rest of the world stronger.
1:21:31
SPEAKER_02: I can definitely see that happening, and uh I am more of in the camp that I think China will eventually.
1:21:40
SPEAKER_02: You know, this book by Ray Dalio from uh The Changing World Order, I think we're sort of in the middle of that?
1:21:49
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, in the middle of it.
1:21:50
SPEAKER_02: At least that's what it feels like, and I think what you're seeing is that many people, one, don't want to accept it, two, Americans don't want to accept it.
1:21:59
SPEAKER_02: But it's kind of inevitable if you look at it objectively, looking at the deficit in the United States, what's happening with Trump just going bananas to Europe and Europe finally hopefully waking up, uh, China becoming more powerful and helping like these less developed countries become stronger.
1:22:18
SPEAKER_02: I think I see it happening.
1:22:19
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if it's gonna happen in our lifetime, but I I definitely see us transitioning to that changing world order.
1:22:27
SPEAKER_00: And I think the world will be more balanced because of it.
1:22:30
SPEAKER_00: It's not it's natural, it will be become more balanced because it's now it's super Western dominated by Western companies or countries.
1:22:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:22:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but the West will have a hard time accepting that, that it becomes more balanced.
1:22:45
SPEAKER_00: What's also what's also one thing we should be mindful of is like it's it's super polarized right now because it's always the enemy, they're making it the enemy.
1:22:53
SPEAKER_00: That's mainly US media because in the Cold War we had Russia phobia, now is it's now it's China phobia because China the US is making China the competitor.
1:23:03
SPEAKER_00: Well, why would we compete?
1:23:05
SPEAKER_00: We can just be friends.
1:23:07
SPEAKER_00: And uh the hard, scary thing is most of the world wars in the world.
1:23:13
SPEAKER_00: I think there was a historic and he he he studied like 17 world wars during humanity.
1:23:18
SPEAKER_00: 70% of them could be explained by a number two power becoming the number one power.
1:23:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so maybe that's gonna happen.
1:23:26
SPEAKER_00: Like it at some point the US won't be the most dominant anymore.
1:23:29
SPEAKER_00: But we should be mindful about what we are doing, how we're doing, and how we can prevent like that super hostile situation that we are creating right now, because that's that's not helping preventing the world war.
1:23:41
SPEAKER_02: No, that's for sure.
1:23:43
SPEAKER_02: So, what's one final lesson?
1:23:46
SPEAKER_02: Something you've learned over the years working at as a strategy, a strategist at Ball.com against Amazon as your as a keynote speaker, fascinated by China and the Western world, whatever it may be.
1:23:58
SPEAKER_02: What's what's one lesson you'd like to our listeners to know?
1:24:03
SPEAKER_02: Something to take away?
1:24:05
SPEAKER_00: I think we'll be more humble and try to learn from like totally different cultures.
1:24:13
SPEAKER_00: That's it, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:24:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's I think that's where it starts.
1:24:18
SPEAKER_00: That's how it starts.
1:24:19
SPEAKER_00: And then after that, like we still think we are superior, we still still think that life here is better, but we have no idea.
1:24:25
SPEAKER_00: And travel a bit, you know, see it for yourself.
1:24:27
SPEAKER_00: Like we can talk about it, but every time when I bring people to China, it's it's when they're there for a few days, they think, oh yeah, holy shit.
1:24:34
SPEAKER_00: And they come back, they come back.
1:24:35
SPEAKER_00: Okay, you can be sad and depressed, but they come back, but they come back fired up.
1:24:39
SPEAKER_00: Like, okay, we need to keep up.
1:24:41
SPEAKER_00: We're we're not behind yet, we're maybe on par.
1:24:44
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe even still ahead because living standards here are super good.
1:24:47
SPEAKER_00: And we we have it, we have it extremely good in the western part of Europe.
1:24:50
SPEAKER_00: Like, life here is extremely comfortable.
1:24:53
SPEAKER_00: Like, life is good here.
1:24:54
SPEAKER_00: We shouldn't take that for granted, and we should work hard to keep it that way.
1:25:00
SPEAKER_02: Beautiful.
1:25:01
SPEAKER_02: I mean, John, this is this has been a long talk.
1:25:03
SPEAKER_02: It's been incredible.
1:25:05
SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for uh taking the time, coming on the show, sharing your insights and uh expertise uh with us.
1:25:11
SPEAKER_02: I'm sure our listeners will enjoy it as much as I have, and if not, just know that I really enjoyed it.
1:25:17
SPEAKER_02: So thanks, it's my pleasure.
1:25:19
SPEAKER_02: For anyone listening, where can people find more information on you?
1:25:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so basically, uh LinkedIn is my main channel.
1:25:26
SPEAKER_00: Just find John Lin, the guy with the green background, and the Chinese guy that helps.
1:25:31
SPEAKER_02: I'll make sure to put it on top and uh share with our uh followers and readers.
1:25:36
SPEAKER_02: So thanks so much, John, and uh I hope to talk to you again sometime.
1:25:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, see you around.
1:25:42
SPEAKER_02: All right, I'm gonna go to the book.