Thursday, March 31

Annual FBCS Meeting


This morning started with a speech from the SEB banks Chief Economist at the Radisson SAS hotel here in Shanghai. It was really interesting to see how the emerging markets are growing fast and doing better and better while many western countries debts increase. Countries with big debt problems at the moment are Greece, Spain and US! In the last few years the US debt has increased from 57 trillion dollars to 107 trillion! dollars. That's a looooot of money...
Later in the evening there was a meeting at the General Consuls home for the Finnish Business Council in Shanghai. Since my company in a member in the Council I went there to represent. There was the normal annual thing stuff like choosing a new board, electing auditor etc plus a summary of the activities last year. There are now 80 Finnish companies that has joined the council and it growing all the time but the Chinese authorities don't let foreigners establish an official Chambers very easily. The FBCS has been trying to get the council official in China since January 2008 but the bill has been rejected 3 times. A lot of work has been done after that to get it to pass and hopefully in April it will be accepted....For some reason the Chinese authorities have not accepted a single foreign chamber in 7 years now! Let's see if we can break that 7 year gap.
Have you ever cursed the heavy shopping bags in supermarket? Say you have a lot of people coming over and you have to buy a lot of drinks (50 cans +) and you don't have a car. Well the perfect solution for that is buying it online and getting it delivered home! I found a store here in Shanghai doing that called www.feidan.com. When ordering for more than 200 RMB the delivery is free. I stocked up the whole kitchen and fridge with a 1100 RMB order, should not be thirsty for a while now :) The best part is that all of this is imported, there are Australian cheese, Italian pepperoni, New Zealand butter, Austrian chocolate etc etc in those bags!

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