Dell's once ground-breaking direct sales model, which spurns dealers and distributors in favour of internet orders, has been found wanting in the west. Now, the US PC giant has decided that Chinese customers also prefer a face-to-face relationship and so it has struck a deal with Gome, the country's largest retailer...   more »

A sign of the times. The new boss of Chrysler's Asia operations comes from SAIC, China's largest car maker. Philip Murtaugh was recently named as CEO for Chrysler's all-important Asian business, which includes the high-growth mass markets of Indian and China...   more »

Giant LED screens are a familiar sight in China's cities but these Made in China screens are now turning up in some unexpected places -- like Ethiopia. Unnamed Chinese manufacturers have signed a deal to supply 16 of the hi-tech LED screens for Ethiopia's millennium celebrations next month...   more »

Many people in the west would be hard-pressed to name a successful Chinese exporter, as few Chinese companies have invested in building a brand. Now they are being urged to move away from the "pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap" image and instead focus on making their own branded products...    more »

FAW VW was the top carmaker in July and VW's Jetta was also the best-selling model. Volkswagen has been very successful in China but it faces new challenges, such as the competiton that has recently broken out between its two Chinese joint ventures for the hotly-contested mid-range segment...    more »

Danone's increasingly bitter dispute with its Chinese partner, Wahaha, is likely to have an "unfavourable impact" on future sales of the French food group. In an ideal world, the two companies would have gone their separate ways long ago. But Danone wants to continue selling water under the market-leading Wahaha brand and it needs Wahaha's sales and distribution network in China...   more »

[INTERVIEW] The UK trade deficit with China has ballooned from £3.8bn to £9.4bn over the past five years. Can anything be done to reverse the trend? Eugene Chang, an adviser to the China-Britain Business Council discusses practical measures to help British firms engage more with China and is particularly keen to encourage the country's 4.3m SMEs...    more »

One of the biggest challenges for westerners looking to engage with China is of course the language issue. EngagingChina was thus heartened to read about an ambitious initiative by Michigan's Oakland County, to become the first county in the US to offer Mandarin in all its its schools...   more »

It took Microsoft over a decade and billions of dollars of lost revenue to learn how to do business in China. And it could it another decade before China takes its rightful place as Microsoft's biggest software market. However, Microsoft's China strategy seems to be paying off, at least if measured by the number of new customers it gets each year in China...   more »

A taskforce has been set up by the UK government to help British design businesses succeed in China's booming £3bn design market. The design-based industries are an area where the west has much to offer to China but many design businesses are small and so the prospect of engaging with China can be daunting...    more »