Made’s Blog

I had a lunch discussion with office mates over few topics like Hollywood vs European movies, Al Pacino, and Pirates of the Caribbean. One of the topic that we talked about was terrorists and their activities. There were four of us (S, M, D and Me), and each of us has our own opinions. So… (more…)

I posted a comment to respond Sutono’s post. He mentions his opinion about world’s economics vs the earth. And in the end, he posted simple questions:

Then the question, how long can the world economy keep growing? Or in other words, when will our earth fail to feed us?

Hardono mentions a thing about ethanol to replace fossil fuels. So I came out with my opinion which is a respond to Sutono and Hardono’s:

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My company learned something. Its ambition to be #1 in 1000 days has been revised. My company realizes that being number 1 is easy, but being #1 with a good foundation is tough. In this context, being #1 means getting the biggest market share.
A public company’s responsibility is clear, to give good numbers to its stockholders. Those people which have the share in the company care with their investment. These are their questions, “How much dividend will I get at the end of the year?”, “How can I get a higher return in the short term?”, “How much is the stock price now?”. The statements are not about, “It’s okay that I lose money as long as this company is #1 in terms of market share.”

Well, I can say that it’s easy to gain market share. Sell your product cheaper than everyone else. But it simply doesn’t work for a long period. One thing being sacrificed, though, is: Profit Margin. Big increase in expenditure, high sales volume, but small increase in profit…, it gives an impression that the company is not healthy… and people start screaming. Tighten the budget. Streamline the process. Shorten the time to change concepts to real products.
So it’s now focusing on something else. Build the brand. Push cost. And high ASP.

Hope it works.

Friendster, the once leading social networking website is losing its ground to myspace and facebook. Couple of years ago, when friendster was the number one social networking platform, google offered to buy friendster for less than $1 bn; Friendster’s owner believed that his internet property was worth more than $1 bn. Could you imagine if Friendster nowadays if it were owned by google?

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Nowadays, China is a very BIG, humongous, giant country. I really mean it. Not only because of its size, but also it’s economic growth. Here is the summary of some stories I found in the Economist.

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