If you accidentally drop by a speech by David Wei, CEO of Alibaba.com, at a networking event organized by the CCIFC near the Chinese New Year, and you don’t know who David is, very likely you will guess the well-groomed guy promoting Alibaba in perfect English and with great diplomacy must be the media director of the E-commerce giant. Like the Group’s chairman & CEO Jack Ma, David Wei knows intuitively how to take advantage of media and publicity to popularize their company and ideas. But different from Jack Ma’s unassuming manner, passion and sheer personal charisma which embodies China’s entrepreneurs, an air of sleekness, caution and well-educated gentlemanship -- traits of many western professional managers -- envelops David Wei, who was born in Shanghai, received education from London Business School, and once an investment banker. The article below is largely based on what David talked that night at the CCIFC party and what we learned from online sources about Alibaba.

Jessie Wang had her first taste of the glamour of the recruitment industry when she was tapped from a renowned management consulting firm to work in Idealpeople, a young but resonating name in the recruiting industry. Two years later, she was struck harder by the charm of recruitment when she was planted in Beijing as the Head of Idealpeople APAC. Now, recruiting both for MNC clients and her own team, she experiences the beauty of connecting high-caliber talents and sterling companies on a daily basis.

If we need to summarise Denis Gihan’s career, Business, Management consultation, Investment and Entrepreneurship will be the most befitting keywords before 2007, after which we should add a new word – China. After earning an MBA from one of France’s elite business schools, Denis spent nearly twenty years in the business world. First worked in the finance and management consulting business for about 13 years, and then had several successful entrepreneurial tries, Denis married a Shanghai-based French lady and relocated there in 2007. Thus begins his China adventure. In this interview Denis discusses with us investment and opportunities in the Far Eastern country.

Whether you are a long-term China watcher or only having a smattering of interest in the Asian country recently, whether you single-mindedly focus on the Orient powerhouse’s industry and finance or just being curious about this ancient civilization’s life and society, you surely will notice the recent popularity of a local TV series called Narrow Dwellings, a metro melodrama on a topic which has too many stakes and emotions attached to it: housing in a modern Chinese city. Well, it takes a ton of pains to afford a house and mortgage in any world metropolis, but in China, a country with underdeveloped credit reporting and rating system, even if you stretched your whole family’s resources and thought you could manage to lay out a down payment, the work and risk does not stop there -- you need to well safeguard the property transaction process. That is exactly where First Title Real Estate Guaranty and its president Mr. Gene Shi come in to help, at the right time.

As the saying goes, you can judge a man by the company he keeps, and we know that wine is men’s best company, so an application of syllogism can lead us to the conclusion that you can judge a man by the wine he keeps. So what about the men who keep Armagnac as company, the most ancient eaux-de-vie (meaning water of life) in France? In this interview we are grateful to meet Albin Roux, the Brand Ambassador and Area Manager for L.E.D.A, which owns the famous Armagnac brand Château de Laubade. Suave, crisp and stylish, Mr. Roux will impress you profoundly as much as the mellow brandy he represents will do.

You may not hear about PCM, but if you ever dabbled in stock market, you are surely familiar with big names like Sinopec and CNPC. PCM provides the driving force for these companies’ oil operations. Its patented product the Progressive Cavity Pump is used in oil well pumping operations all over the world, under whatever geologic circumstance, withstanding whatever climate and temperature. As driving as his company’s proprietary PCP, Mr. Emmanuel Gros launched the PCP Asia Pacific branch single-handedly in Shanghai in 2002. After seven years’ continual boom, the company now is well-oiled to force through any viscous fluid, any seemingly unpenetrable financial tsunami. 

15 years ago, when a bunch of energetic and ambitious Taiwanese launched Capstone Construction & Development Co. in mainland China, all around them was towering cranes and roaring bulldozers. Now after all these years’ booming construction, when I went inside the roomy office of Mr. Tseng, General Manager of Capstone Construction, I was first greeted by the soaring cranes brandishing proudly outside his big window.