Jing Daily’s Top Posts For The Week In case you missed them the first time around, here are some of Jing Daily’s top posts for the week of July 12-16.: Global Luxury Brands “Testing The Waters” In China’s E-Commerce Market Over the past few years, as Chinese consumers have embraced e-commerce, online retailers specializing in European luxury goods have become wildly popular with shoppers looking to sidestep China’s heavy luxury taxes. These independent online shops — often run by Chinese overseas students in their spare time — by and large are hosted on Taobao, China’s hugely successful answer to eBay, and process payment through Alipay, Taobao’s answer to Paypal. Recently, however, Paypal linked up with China UnionPay in an effort to compete with Alipay — which claims 3/4 of China’s online payment market — offering Paypal accounts that allow customers to shop on overseas websites. While this might be bad news for Alipay, the ever-intensifying fight for market share is great news for Chinese consumers, who now have an increasing number of options for online shopping. As a People’s Daily article this week points out, as online payment companies continue to duke it out and offer more incentives, Chinese shoppers can now avoid dealing with currency exchange and do more direct online shopping from individual global luxury brands or shopping portals. A Chinese Demographic Not To Neglect: Trendy, Big-Spending Men This May, Jing Daily translated an interesting Chinese-language article that outlined an emerging trend it called “he fashion” in major Chinese cities, exemplified by a growing number of relatively wealthy, younger men spending freely on everything from designer clothes to personal care items. According to that article, major luxury brands are making a mistake by more directly targeting female consumers in China, since men still account for the majority of luxury sales in China (PDF). Though, as we pointed out, 50% of luxury purchases last year in China were made with the intention of giving the items away as gifts. This week, AsiaOne looks at the “he fashion” demographic, noting that the comparatively flashy sense of style being fostered among the younger fashion denizens in some of China’s wealthier cities presents an opportunity for fashion houses that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world at the moment, save perhaps for Dubai or Moscow. Moutai Planning Major Global Push, But Can It Make Headway Outside Of Chinatowns? Moutai, China’s top maker of premium baijiu, is planning an ambitious new global marketing strategy that the company hopes could see its products venturing beyond Chinatowns and into the homes of wine drinkers in coming years, according to an article in China Entrepreneur. While we’ve heard similar claims before from premium baijiu brands like the LVMH-owned Wenjun and Quanxing (partly owned by Diageo), and there are many reasons why the traditional Chinese spirit faces an uphill battle among non-Chinese drinkers, Moutai’s strategy may succeed on the basis of comparatively modest expectations. Heartened by an expected 8% sales boost this year due to the Shanghai World Expo, Maotai Group chairman Yuan Renguo recently said he hopes to establish Moutai as one of the world’s most famous liquor brands and boost exports by 20% in the short- to medium-term. L’Oreal Expects China To Become Third-Largest Market This Year L’Oreal has bounced back from the global economic crisis in a big way, recently announcing double-digit Q2 growth powered mainly by developing markets like China and India. Among the BRICs, however, China looms large. Last week, Lan Zhenzhen, the vice-president of L’Oreal China, announced in Shanghai that the company expects China to leap two spots to become L’Oreal’s third-largest market — trailing only the U.S. and France — within the year. From the Global Times: “China has occupied five percent of the Group’s market as of the end of last year, and the sales figures in the first half of this year have shown that China has moved even higher,” said Lan, without elaborating on the exact figures. Zhao Yunhu: “China Should Reshape The Luxury Ecosystem” Recently, Zhang Zhifeng, the founder and Chief Art Director of the Chinese fashion house NE-TIGER said that Chinese luxury brands need to be bold enough to break with the prevailing Western-centric fashion order and create and play by their own rules if they’re going to be successful domestically and overseas. Though Zhang believes the odds are stacked against Chinese luxury brands at the moment, as he told the crowd at the Prestige Brands Forum in Shanghai, “based on the market potential of billions of population, based on China’s 5000 years of civilization and its cultural heritage of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, and based on the passion and creativity of the new Chinese generation of designers, I believe in our future in the Chinese luxury brand industry.” Apparently Zhang’s optimism is shared by a growing chorus of Chinese luxury insiders. At the recent China Luxury Summit, Zhao Yunhu (赵云虎), president of the Chinese fashion manufacturer Shenzhen Copais, issued a controversial declaration, saying the Chinese luxury industry is ripe for a revolution — led by home-grown brands and design talent — to combat European dominance. From the Chinese news site Foreign Trade.