Hi guys, suddenly two weeks had past and its time for another reflection. In today's reflection I will be focusing about the various group presentations, my thoughts about them and some personal suggestions.
  Firstly though, I want to congratulate myself for getting used to the CDE style of learning, which is constant reading and doing projects at home while we discuss what we learnt in class. This style of learning was very different from that of other subjects but now that I got used to it, it is actually beneficial to use different types of learning styles to reduce stress.
  In cooperation with our learning of the difference between the East and the West and the different cultures of digital titans like Google and Apple, we divided into groups to do a project. Each group is to research on a brand or company that achieved great success in China but only have limited success internationally, what are the causes of this and some suggestions to break through the international market barrier. Each group is supposed to use Google and Apple as model examples by stating how each company can learn from these two internationally successful titans. Furthermore, each group has to show the ability to link why the company is successful or not to  internationally to cultural factors. Some of the companies chosen are lining, tebu, Lenovo and our group's company, wexin.
  After finishing all the presentations in a few lessons, here are some of my personal takeaways and impressions. Firstly, it is commendable that each group put in great effort in their project as every group can summarise why their respective company succeeded in China but not in the globe and each group gave new and realistic suggestions to help the company to break into the international markets. For example, follow the working schedule of Google to improve productivity of workers, increasing the price so as to show confidence in its own products and to employ a foreign talent that is known and respected in a region to help to publicise and market products to external regions. However, not the whole class is involved in the learning process and thus the knowledge that each group presented is not spread around the class. I experienced this first hand when I saw classmates not paying attention when our group is presenting and me myself being very sleepy during the last two group presentations. I understand that this phenomenon is inevitable as our presenters are not professional and the listeners are not actively engaged in this one sided monologue. Thus I suggest putting the presentation in debate form. Take the two groups working on lining and tebu for example, since both are sport equipment brands, they are similar and can be used for comparison. By letting both groups present together in a debate fashion, the rest of the class can compare the different methods the companies used to break into the international market and gauge how successful each company is relatively. This way of presenting also encourages the audience to become active and speak out their views, adding on to the learning, achieving win-win. Secondly, I feel that each group has stated plenty of reasons why the Chinese companies have limited success in international markets, however, only a minority of the reasons are related to the difference between two cultures. Personally, I think that the difference in cultures plays a huge part in whether a Chinese company can break into external markets successfully. Take for example the fact that the Chinese prefer low price products while the Americans prefer high quality products. Since Americans tend to regard low price products as low quality products, cheap Chinese phones, despite having great designs and functionality, is not welcomed in America because the low price tags encourages Americans to think the phone to be of low quality and the brand to have little confidence in themselves. They would rather spend the money of several Chinese phones to buy themselves an iPhone, simply because of the brand and the confidence it has in its customers. Thus cultural differences is an important factor and should be paid more attention to.
  After reviewing all the presentations, I realise that despite how different each company is, they face similar challenges in breaking through the foreign market, namely low popularity as in the people who know this brand from other countries, strong international competitors that are popular and the lack of a good way to market and publicise the products. Such as the topic for our group weixin, who faces the nearly insurmountable obstacle of WhatsApp and claims that the Chinese government will use the personal information of foreign users. By reflecting on these main issues, I think the main challenges for these Chinese companies are trust and popularity. Chinese companies need to be clear that they stand apart from the government and will protect the privacy of its customers so as to develop trust, which can then progress to popularity. And as for popularity, my personal advice is that the companies should not focus on suddenly invade the whole international market, as the spread will strain their resources and attention. Instead, they should start small by developing unwavering popularity in each region first, and slowly the popularity and trust of the companies will increase naturally.
  And that's the end of the presentations and reflection, I have learnt tremendously from this and hope you do too. Thank you.