Author Archives: admin

29 August 2017 · 3:38 pm

The Black Olive: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

A long time ago, in a former life, far-far away I remember tasting a succulent, savoury black fruit. I seem to recollect buying them in jars – from all good purveyors of food. I would add them to salads, pasta, maybe in mischief even to a curry. They were known as black olives.

But if such things still exist, surely I must be able to find them in Hong Kong too. Few cities are as obsessed with food and shopping (though strangely not cooking) as Hong Kong. I searched the supermarkets near my home and office. Obviously a Mediterranean fruit would not be a staple component of the Cantonese diet, but surely some stores would sell them.

I went to one after another supermarket. Food sales in Hong Kong is a cosy duopoly shared by Dairy Farms (Jardine-Matheson) and PARKnSHOP (Lee Ka-shing) who between them account for 94.6% of food sales. (This is a fake-statistic because next to no business-intelligence is published in Hong Kong. There is no lovely Kantor World panel, nor any pesky CMA haranguing retail with competition enquiries. It’s approach to competition could have been dreamt up by John D. Rockefeller and Ayn Rand).

Perhaps, in the spirit of Nassim Taleb, the probability of a store selling olives is astonishingly non-random, like wealth or prowess at writing best-sellers. Maybe 99.999% stores don’t stock olives, and one store sells has cornered the market. That would be very Hong Kong. I came tantalisingly close in one large retail chain. Next to a jar of green olives, was a can of black olives.

But every new condiment shelf was like the last. I was starring in Groundhog Day but instead of Sonny and Cher singing I got You Babe every morning I déjà vu-ed shelves of pickled vegetables, soya sauce laid out precisely like in the last shop.

But this tale has a happy ending. Hong Kong is one of the only countries in the world outside the UK where M&S still manages to make a profit. It does this by air-freighting all their lovely food-stuffs to Hong Kong circumventing the duopolies stranglehold on local suppliers provisioning their competition. The store in Central had jar after jar of black olives. I bought two.

2 Comments

Filed under Whimsy

11 January 2017 · 12:13 am

When cash becomes paper

On 8th November hundreds of millions of people were startled to find their country had inflicted a grievous act of self-harm which would throw society into disarray. If they had bothered to switch on foreign news, they might also have noticed the US presidential election polls were closing. Continue reading →

The unbearable lightness of Toblerone

Earlier this week my son told me about an end-of-year costume party he was going to attend themed around all the horrors of 2016 and asked how he should dress. His friends would no doubt dress up as Trump, Farage and Boris Johnson. I suggested he should honour His Royal Purpleness, or perhaps David Bowie – both great in terms of wacky clothes. Then, my son mentioned dressing up as a Toblerone to commemorate its tragic downsizing. I assumed he was being frivolous, but he insisted he genuinely mourned its shrinkage. He said lots of other confectionaries and snacks were doing the same thing.

In a sense, the shrinking chocolate bar does represent a truly existentialist threat to capitalism. Maybe I wasn’t properly appreciating the historical significance of its loss of heft. Every quarter poor Mondelēz International has to spin a yarn to its shareholders on how it plans to grow dividends. Ideally it would like to sell more chocolate at a higher price. But the company also owns Cadbury’s, Oreo, Terry’s and the handful of brands not owned by Mars and Nestle. As result of this concentration in the market, a proportion of extra sales will cannibalise sales of its own brands.

How to grow sales? The market for chocolate must surely be geographically saturated. I’ve seen its products in the tiniest village store in Philippines. I feel guilt every time I buy a medium sized bar of chocolate, so there’s zero probability of my upsizing to the larger bar, or heaven forbid buying two bars when I want a sneaky mid-afternoon snack. This is nothing to do with income or price elasticity. Doubling my income, or halving the price would not induce me to consume more. My body is rejecting the more chocolate with a Maslowian physiological insistence. Are we hitting peak chocolate? So what is capitalism to do?

So with stagnant sales all a firm can do is improve productivity or reduce portion size and hope customers don’t grumble. But productivity growth in manufacturing cannot keep growing indefinitely – factories have already been mechanised, supply chains squeezed. And the size of the product can’t keep on shrinking.

So maybe capitalism’s success at producing an abundance of goods, with a miniscule workforce through a handful of companies means that capitalism will eat itself. I wonder what will be left behind.

Perhaps my son should dress up as Fidel Castro.

1 Comment

Filed under Whimsy

31 July 2016 · 11:43 am

Hong Kong’s LegCo elections

On 4^th September, sandwiched between the Brexit vote and the US elections, Hong Kongers have the opportunity to vote in the four yearly LegCo elections.

Hong Kong’s democratic processes are a hangover from its colonial days – the first election took place in 1995 two years before handover. UK graciously offering HK a tantalising taste of democracy, after having denied it to for the preceding 150 years.

HK’s legislature currently has 70 members, half of them are elected from five geographic constituencies, and most of the rest either by business sectors (like industry) or professional bodies (like accountants), so-called “functional” constituencies. A myriad of different political parties are fielding candidates – with seemingly more parties than there are constituencies seats. The parties loosely fall into the pro-Beijing “Establishment” camp which controls LegCo and the pan-democrat “Opposition” camp.

This year, the opposition is being split by the entry of eight, young localist candidates emboldened by the Occupy movement that want constitutional reform (which is code for the un-constitutional secession from Mainland). The well-known Umbrella movement leader Joshua Wong is still under 21, so cannot stand. You can get a flavour for their politics from the leaflet. They have a long litany of grievances against the Mainland: that Hong Kong takes in 150 Mainland immigrants a day (randomly chosen by ballot, unlike other countries that select by thickness of wallet), there is a weakening of Cantonese culture, particularly through greater teaching of Mandarin at schools and meddling in domestic HK politics by the central communist party. Their biggest fear is that HK will become just another Chinese city and lose its unique identity. At the time of writing one of the candidates had his candidacy invalidated because he refused to sign a form agreeing Hong Kong is an inalienable part of China.

Altogether 89 candidates are contesting the 35 geographic seats, and 65 candidates are contesting the functional seats. Two of my friends are standing in the election. One is already a LegCo member he’s a renowned pan-dem lawyer whose interests include environmental and social issues. He is seeking re-election for the accounts functional constituency. The other is a district councillor, originally from the Netherlands, but settled on HK for many years and who is making his second stab at the elections.

The candidates sometimes hang around the MTR stations. I spoke to Cheng Kam Mun one of the young localists about what policies he stood for aside from freedom from the Mainland, but drew a blank. His campaign is only really fought on one axis – opposition to Mainland China. This is a shame because there is so much more young politicians like him could and should get hot under the collar about.

As someone who spends more time listening to LegCo debates than is healthy I have a lot of sympathy for the young people’s views that politics is not representing their interests. They characterise all villainy as emanating from Beijing, but there are baddies closer to home, too. A couple of weeks ago I listened to the debate on the medical bill. The Bill aims to make it easier for foreign qualified doctors to practice in HK, and also to increase lay representation on the medical complaints board. The bill was successfully filibustered by the “expert” LegCo member from the doctor’s functional constituency. Another debate on a proposed scheme to introduce premium taxi franchises was roundly attacked by LegCo members for upsetting the existing interests of taxi drivers and taxi license owners. The least bland politican is “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung who has been almost impeached, physically thrown out of the chamber and imprisoned for his implacable views but who genuinely cares about worker rights and minimum wages and is one of the few people that visibly represents the common man in the chamber. The other person to look out for is Ricky Wong. He is a successful businessman, more Bloomberg than Trump, and is running on a get rid of CY ticket but also favours Hong Kong business becoming more hi-tech and competitive, and breaking the grip of the current business interests.

I asked young members of my team famous people they would most like to have a heart-to-heart conversation with. Their choices were mainly global. One person said Chris Patten. The reason they gave was because they wanted to hear how Patten made decisions especially how he traded off different people’s interests. A second colleague said they’d love to spend time with Bill Gates or the person that set up Facebook. Both these figures had been at the heart of technologies that so changed everyone’s life. A third person said Tsai Ing-Wen, the then President–elect of Taiwan. Tsai is the first female head of state in Taiwan, and perhaps also the Sinophere.

Anyway I’ll simply be observing the elections. Temporary residents like me aren’t allowed to vote.

1 Comment

Filed under Politics

25 June 2016 · 3:39 am

…What just happened yesterday?

Still can’t get my head around yesterday. In all my adult life yesterday is only the third time I’ve voted for the winning person / option (the other two were voting for Maya in the Camden Council elections). Usually whatever I vote for loses. Maybe I should campaign for Trump to avoid this.