Bowtie Life Insurance Company Limited (Bowtie) was the first virtual insurance company licensed by the Hong Kong Insurance Authority. Since obtaining the licence in 2018 and raising two successful rounds of venture capital, Bowtie had developed into a reasonable size, of about a hundred employees, by early 2022. Bowtie was focused on developing and selling medical insurance products under the Voluntary Health Insurance Scheme (VHIS), while also selling term life insurance. The founders’ intention is to bring cheaper, more user-friendly insurance products directly to the mass market through online channels, while disrupting the traditional insurance industry by eliminating agents and brokers. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2022 brought both opportunities and risks to the virtual insurance sector. While online purchases increased significantly during this period, the overall gloomy macroeconomic outlook put downward pressure on insurtech, fintech industries, and the venture capital that funded them. With Hong Kong’s mortality rates soaring, Bowtie had to consider the effects of the pandemic on its profitability and determine its future strategy. While continuing to focus on the VHIS segment, how should Bowtie expand into other product segments? When and how should the company expand to Mainland China and/or other neighbouring markets outside of Hong Kong?
Hong Kong-headquartered SenseTime Group Inc. (SenseTime) was founded in 2014 to commercialize artificial intelligence (AI) and was a global leader in deep-learning AI, with applications in Smart Business (facial recognition), Smart City (property damage and theft detection), Smart Life (interacting with the Internet of Things to improve consumer experience), and Smart Auto (autonomous driving). December 10, 2021, was supposed to be the date for setting the offer price for SenseTime shares in the company’s global initial public offering. Instead, it was the date that Xu Li, co-founder and chief executive officer of SenseTime, learned from Hong Kong Clearings and Exchange Ltd. that American President Joe Biden was about to designate SenseTime a Communist Chinese Military Company—an action that prevented American investors from legally investing in SenseTime, derailing the initial public offering. How should SenseTime alter its marketing, research and development, and listing strategies in the light of the American government’s actions? How would the increased tension affect the geographic, technological, and customer aspects of SenseTime’s efforts to drive business growth?
Aglaia Kong, the founder and chief executive officer of Guangdong LeapFive Technology Co. Ltd., a Chinese fabless chip design start-up, is facing a broken supply chain, with issues running from electronic design automation and core internet protocol through to fabrication, packaging, and testing in bringing up her Internet of things chip sets for industrial applications. Using fifth-generation open-source reduced instruction set computing instruction set architecture, she must assess a supply chain buffeted by severe bullwhip shortages and political headwinds, analyze her company’s strategy, and plot a course to assure it will be among the 2 per cent of Chinese chip start-ups that do not fail.
The Green Monday Group was co-founded in 2012 by Hong Kong entrepreneur David Yeung. Capitalizing on the developing global sustainability movement and the market opportunity from growth in flexitarianism, Yeung acquired a research and development company to innovate a plant-based pig meat product, OmniPork. Through product innovation, global distribution, and celebrity endorsement, Yeung was determined to bring OmniPork to global markets. He announced in 2020 that Green Monday Holdings had raised US$70 million of equity investment, the largest funding of its kind in Asia. In 2021, the question left was how those funds could be used to expand flexitarianism globally and capture new consumers of OmniPork.
Green Monday Group (GMG) was founded in 2012 with a mission to “construct a multi-faceted global ecosystem of future food that combats climate change, food insecurity, public health crisis, planetary devastation, and animal suffering.” In 2020, GMG partnered with McDonald’s in Hong Kong and launched six dishes featuring OmniPork Luncheon Meat, a plant-based meat substitute that GMG had developed. In February 2021, the chief executive officer and co-founder of GMG had to figure out how GMG could expand its partnership with McDonald’s in Hong Kong to the rest of China. McDonald’s size and potential in the rest of China far exceeded that of McDonald’s Hong Kong, and while GMG had the resources and the determination to expand, it had to decide which marketing strategy to use.
Benny Chung-Ying Zee was a professor at a prestigious university in Hong Kong and founder of Health View Bioanalytic Limited (Health View). Health View offered fast, inexpensive, non-invasive assessments of the risk of stroke and Alzheimer’s disease by using artificial intelligence and automatic retinal image analysis (ARIA) of pictures of patients’ retinas using fundus cameras. While Health View was breaking even, Zee realized that it was not yet a success. Thus, Zee was considering how to scale up the company to realize the impact of its technology. Zee had to assess the current business model—its value proposition, target market, sales channels, and strategic partners—and determine how he could scale up and redirect Health View.
The chief executive officer (CEO) of the soon-to-be completed CUHK Medical Centre Ltd. (CUMC) in Hong Kong must make a decision regarding health care logistics services. The hospital’s tender board is scheduled to meet in June 2019, and the CEO must recommend whether the logistics services needed by the hospital should be provided internally or by a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, and, if a 3PL provider, which provider should be awarded the business.
In late May 2020, the two founding and managing partners at Redhill Capital, in the Pearl River New City district of Guangzhou, China, were considering various reasons why the year was developing far differently than they had expected. The two-year-old venture capital firm’s limited partners and investees were all shocked by the dire developments, as was the entire country and the whole world. Earlier that year, rapidly spreading outbreaks of COVID-19, which had started in Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province, had led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and many countries were closing down their borders. With the world seemingly plunging into a deep depression, the two founders of Redhill Capital were wondering about the future of their venture capital firm, which normally invested in medical technology and biotechnology. How should the company’s strategy be adjusted to survive the crisis and take advantage of new opportunities in the rapidly changing world?
In 2018, China Merchants Bank, China’s seventh-largest bank and the 30th-largest bank in the world, strategically repositioned itself in “light banking” to address the changing competitive landscape and rapid entry of non-bank financial technology companies. These companies were using information technology to compete in China’s domestic payments market. China Merchants Bank was also actively stimulating innovation. Through its incubation fund, the bank provided funding to its business units for new technology projects. The bank’s president was reviewing one specific project financed by the fund—the cross-border payments blockchain system. He was eager to determine the success of the project and the potential for future development of the blockchain technology, in his efforts to understand the applicability of blockchain to banking in general, and to payments banking in particular.
SenseTime Group Limited was founded in Hong Kong in 2014 to commercialize artificial intelligence for digital recognition of images, particularly human faces. After only three years in business, the company was profitable, with annual sales revenue of about US$100 million. In 2018, it employed over 2,000 workers and was referred to as the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence start-up, with a valuation of US$7.6 billion. China had become the largest market in the world for facial recognition technologies, with its share of global sales expected to grow from 29 per cent in 2017 to 45 per cent in 2023. And the global facial recognition market was forecast to be worth US$6.5 billion by 2021. SenseTime Group Limited aimed to empower more industries throughout the world with its artificial intelligence platform. A key question in early 2019 for the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer was how to adapt its strategy to achieve that mission in an increasingly fraught global environment.
The chief executive officer (CEO) of the government-owned Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) is setting the marketing policy for the incubation program at HKSTP, Hong Kong’s leading incubator of high-technology companies. Seeing marketing as a driving force to convey the strategy of HKSTP, the CEO must analyze the key services through which HKSTP can increase an incubatee’s chances of success; analyze the advantages and disadvantages that HKSTP presents for a start-up’s location; analyze how HKSTP positions itself in the competitive market for incubation services; discern how successful it is; and determine what marketing ideas HKSTP should use to convey its competitive advantages. The task is complicated by the global nature of the incubatee servicing market, the position of Hong Kong within the Greater Bay Area of the People’s Republic of China, and the CEO’s belief that a company has to be on its own, not relying on government programs. Not only did the CEO have to give HKSTP’s incubatees the resources to help them survive and prosper, but he also had to attract the best tech start-ups to join the program.
Ofo (stylized “ofo”), a Beijing-based bicycle-sharing company, had grown bicycle sharing from nothing into a dockless mobile application (app) service industry with over 120 million monthly active users sharing 30 million bicycles in cities across China and around the world. Founded by five bicycle enthusiasts in 2014, its dockless system used a smartphone application to unlock and locate nearby bicycles, charging an hourly rate for use. Although only two years old in 2017—and yet to turn a profit—the company was valued at over USD 1 billion in a recent E round of private-equity financing. ofo’s new funds would be used to buy bicycles for international expansion and hire more talent, but in a rapidly changing, highly competitive environment, the company needed to assess its current and future position.
The chairman of Fuyao Glass Industry Group Co. Ltd. was pleased with his company’s financial results for the first half of 2018. Two years earlier, the organization’s subsidiary, Fuyao Glass America Inc., had completed the construction of the largest auto glass manufacturing facility in the world, which was located in Moraine, Ohio. Its revenues in the first half of 2018 had surged 27 per cent compared with the previous year, while groupwide revenues of the organization had grown 16 per cent. Fuyao Glass America Inc. had converted its loss of ¥65 million into a profit of ¥48 million. With deteriorating relations between the governments of China and the United States (U.S.) indicating an uncertain future, some social pundits were criticizing the organization for deserting China by investing overseas. The chairman remained defiant and confident in his strategy, but how would the company’s U.S. expansion and global strategy be affected by recent developments in the relationship between China and the United States?
As the end of 2016 approached, the managing director of AmorePacific Hong Kong (APHK) was setting the media mix and budget for APHK’s four makeup and skin care brands: ETUDE HOUSE, LANEIGE, Sulwhasoo, and AMOREPACIFIC. Tourists shopping in Hong Kong from mainland China comprised over half of the company’s sales. However, in the face of a declining number of tourists and the shrinking of luxury goods spending, the managing director had to consider the marketing tools in the customer decision journey; competitive positioning; and the distribution of the marketing budget between traditional and digital channels in the upcoming bi-monthly campaigns. She needed to strike an appropriate balance between recruiting new customers and retaining existing customers within APHK’s overall strategy for Greater China.