Page 68 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

Joyo. The busy, colorful orange and turquoise site Dangdang runs is hopping
with everything from discounts on a new Harry Potter title to Ikea bath
towels and Seiko watches to CDs from local pop sensations.
With few exceptions, she has gotten the merchandising mix right for
Dangdang’s consumers. YuYu handpicks the items for sale on the Dangdang
site, and she has a good eye for design. She notices, for example, the Parisian-
made Lancel handbag I’m carrying and compliments me on its unusual
eggplant-colored leather. The merchandise on her site is sold almost exclu-
sively within China, with no foreign marketing or promotion. Overseas cus-
tomers can order goods from the site and have them shipped by a courier
service such as DHL. She blends local goods with well-known Western brands
such as Oil of Olay for the site’s customers, who tend to be middle-income
city dwellers. “I would like 40 million Chinese buying from Dangdang. I
could have so much power over consumers. I could change the way people
dress,” says YuYu.
Just as benchmarking and copying competitors have given Dangdang a
leading edge in China, the strong financial background of cofounder YuYu
has been a big plus. YuYu handles finance and accounting plus legal, human
resources, and administration, and her husband works in marketing and tech-
nology. They make appointments to meet in the office and try not to discuss
business at home, where they are raising a 10-year-old boy.
Finance work comes naturally for YuYu, as it does for Bezos, a former
investment banker. At age 22, she was asked to accompany a high-level
Chinese trade delegation to 12 U.S. cities in 18 days and serve as a translator
and ad hoc bookkeeper for the trip, a task that meant recording every
penny spent by the provincial government chiefs. She came to the United
States in 1987 as an international graduate student at the University of
Oregon but dropped out to pursue a business career. She helped negotiate a
joint venture for a Chinese power company near Akron, Ohio, and then
became a sales manager at a timber company in Cleveland for a year. With
her savings, she earned an MBA in finance from New York University. In the
early 1990s, she landed a job on Wall Street. There, she spent the next few
years working as a partner in a small New York City investment banking
firm, advising corporate clients ranging from Chinese companies to large
multinationals such as UPS on leveraged buyouts, mergers and acquisitions,
and financial projections.

42 SILICON DRAGON