Housekeeping Beijing Business Plan Sample

A Beijing, mainland China based housekeeping company will strike a careful balance in between the core and short-term portfolio of services, or market segments, versus the more promising layer of the so-called ‘non-customers’ that could be tapped as part of a Blue Ocean type approach. Among other things, the tradeoff between differentiation and incremental cost could be overcome in ways offering a large as well as controllable margin and IRR performance alike amidst arbitrary extra outlays or operating leverage pressure. The interim seasonality, though limited, will be modeled as following a WMA pattern, whereas the longer-term revenue dynamics will draw upon perceived value or time relevance that has to do with quality laden risk aversion. A PESTLE based SWOT analysis shows how the company’s strengths and opportunities could ironically accrue to or be catalyzed by the economy’s or host environment’s restrictions. Policy implications and strategic recommendations are inferred from the cumulative analysis in light of all the critical pillars of analysis seconding each other. At the valuation end, it is demonstrated that the IRR far exceeds the RRR or discount hurdle for all practical purposes and under any reasonable set of assumptions, with normal expected payoffs coming to outmatch the anomalous recent performance of the Hang Seng CE sub-index.

Company Profile

1.1 Scope of Services or Product Portfolio

Housekeeping Services Beijing (HKS Beijing) will be a Chinese based company that finds itself operating in liaison with the construction cluster as a long-term or B2B growth pillar and the tourism sector at the B2C upper end. The short-term core of the sales will be comprised of housekeeping services as diverse as:

• Regular clean-up and maid services that come in forms as diverse as, general cleaning (on a daily basis) and thorough cleaning (prior to nation-wide holidays or family and community festivities)
• Home maintenance, minor repair, and office fixture and appliance management
• Domestic risk management other than safeguarding options
• Unbundled lodging and accommodation outside regular hotel services
• Commuting and guest hosting for family reunions or corporate staged events
• Giving a ride to kids en route to school and back home, as well as to the elderly and physically challenged customers who may need assistance when getting around the house or needing emergency transportation to the hospital
• Pet care and pest control for those busy or handicapped versus those keeping lot-are gardens or top-floor green areas
• Cooking services and more comprehensive training courses enabling some of our customers to enroll as our would-be employees at the expansion stage

In the interim run, the company will consider expanding into the Beijing–Tianjin–Liaoning area. However, the key expansion or entry strategy will center on a non-geographic agenda for portfolio re-balancing.

1.2 Market Segmentation

Our market segmentation will too feature a core audience as opposed to the peripheral ones:
The younger generation (the ‘millennial kids’) who are 19 to 25 years of age and are either reluctant or time-pressured to do their housework. For that matter, many of them could lack the experience or expertise to handle some of the more skill-intensive chores, e.g. plumbing and high-voltage solutions.
Married couples as well as single individuals aged 21 to 40 (an overlap of ‘genX’ and ‘millennials’) who are either too busy sharing their social or gender roles or are both full-time employers eager to take a break at any reasonable cost. The lower bracket points to those about to enter the labor market and possibly preferring the value or budget solutions (price shoppers). By and large, however, this is the more stable core of our wide moat in that it exhibits most lasting as well as versatile preferences that could allow for complementarity or solution selling rather than unbundling.
The ‘baby-boomer’ audience featuring the 60 to 79 year olds commences the demand residual largely having to do with either leisure travel or health commuting, as well as a host of health related assistance options.
One further interim or overlapping layer posits married women falling under all of the age brackets who either stay home boasting a lot of flexible hours and thus counting as prospective employees or those securing the word of mouth within their social networks.
It should be kept in mind, however, that a Blue Ocean strategy is to rethink the audiences as well as their inter-relationships.

Web & Social Media Plan

The bulk of our marketing stance will build upon social networks—whether it be social media (SM) or word-of-mouth vehicles. In fact, online solutions for social interaction bridge the residual gap between the two, so that the entire marketing or value chain boils down to a full-fledged transaction portal as integrated with a Facebook based SMM platform. At that rate, we can economize on brick-and-mortar overhead as well as inventory supply warehousing. In the latter case, a near-lean or just-in-time (JIT) inventory management and tracking system will translate to most efficient, or short-float, working capital management showing a minimal gap between receivables versus payables aging. Although an e-commerce add-on may not, in and of itself, secure an edge, it will be shown how a Blue Ocean strategy could convey a lot of robustness to our system responding to any major boosts in the overhead.

Polishing Your Writing to Make it Shine

Market Analysis

3.1 Background

China’s economy has skyrocketed over the past two decades, with GDP total soaring along with its per-capita counterpart (World Bank, 2014). Regardless of whether that may have come at odds with real productivity boost, disposable incomes or real wages have outpaced the growth rate in ways that strike a peculiar balance between decelerating growth versus mounting cumulative wealth. What both suggest is that the representative busy professional will increasingly come to value her time and employment opportunities while exhibiting more exacting expectations on the quality of housekeeping services. The latter sector, along with the dining-out segment of food retail, has built on a tossup of income and substitution effects, in light of the demand being derivative of shrinking spare time and growing career or self-actualization stakes. In fact, the latter points to an overlapping audience, bearing in mind that, full-time students seeking to gain a superb education, find themselves busy and desperate to allocate their scarce time into augmenting their human capital.
It is for this reason that we envisage significant transferability or sustainability to our business model that builds on the so-called ‘Blue Ocean’ strategy a la Kim and Mauborgne (2005) seeking to create new opportunities and garner wider audiences rather than competing for the existing and overtapped ones. The approach will seek to overcome the differentiation constraints underpinning the divide between the small price takers and the large players incurring hefty outlays in an attempt at securing minor or marginal differentiation. Not least, the inter-generational dimension builds on an incentive overlap bridging the heredity gap between the two segments, i.e. baby boomer and ‘generation X’ professionals versus the ‘millennial kids’ yet to enter the labor market. Unlike out West, the demographic pyramid is not ‘hourglass’ degenerate and is regular shaped thus enabling continuity of and equilibrium between the formation of human capital versus earning capacity buildup, both mapping to sustainable effective demand (Zolli, 2006).

3.2 Sales Premises

One has to be familiar with the particular micro-marketing ins and outs of demand patterns as well as preference trend shifts in order to infer an accurate inter-temporal distribution of unit sales and markup leeway. For one, the former hinges crucially on the ongoing bargaining power or market share, which could be presumed near zero by definition from the outset or at the entry stage. On the other hand, that need not amount to as meager a ‘wide moat,’ which broader domain captures, in addition to market power, pillars as diverse as, loyalty network or social media induced buy-in, low substitution threats or unique value facets, and scope economies as well as possibly the irrelevance of large initial efficiency scale.
Whilst social media marketing (SMM) invariably comes in handy as the vehicle of delving into the detail of statistical micro-marketing or preference structure and relevance response patterns, it can only be made full-fledged use of in the event the product concept is unique yet intuitive enough to appeal to the target audience being established. This kind of circularity that is characteristic of any entry phase can best be resolved by zooming in on the trade-off of low-cost yet minor differentiation versus major ‘value divergence’ which, in the blue-ocean strategy lingo, need not be paid through the nose for.

The flipside, however, is that one will be challenged to locate a segment of ‘non-customers’ or otherwise the market layer heretofore untapped. The good news is that, the new product concept or value structure need not really be all that unique early on, so long as the emerging market is largely unsaturated. For Beijing, that could be the case at the moment, even though the first-mover edge will soon have been dissipated as it can be mimicked at a low cost. Therefore, our perceived value ought to keep standing out in major ways, if we are to remain the unrivaled incumbent and trend setter.

Objectives

Among other things, this report aims at developing a blue-ocean (BO) strategy operational enough to allow for consistent and controllable business modeling as well as valuation. The key to success would be to penetrate the segment for busy professionals who are potentially far too risk-averse, with respect to their time value or opportunity cost, for them to consider switch or venture further search. In a market known for adverse selection and distributed ‘value,’ or indeed unreliable price to quality tradeoffs, reputation and trust will be the single most important complementary couple making up the bulk of the goodwill’s earning power. Since this intangible layer of assets might dominate, so too would the perceived value—which could be captured on the pricing side of the income statement wherever it is awkward to directly account for in the balance sheet items.

Marketing Analysis & Forecasting

5.1 Operating Earnings Streams: Key Assumptions

To begin with, no material seasonality will reasonably apply to demand for housekeeping services, except for the Chinese and ex-pat seasons of holidays at year start and the vacationing slot sometime mid-year running June through August. Other than that, the demand should not be very cyclical when it comes to relative variability equivalents such as the ‘beta.’ Although it may not directly apply to non-corporate ownership or control anyway, it will be used to arrive at the WACC discount for valuation purposes.
That said, demand may well prove elastic when it comes to income levels as well as economy or real business cycle, with the whole of the services sector contracting most dramatically as a downside response. Apart from the income effect, the representative customer may be confronted with substitution alternatives such as employing housekeeping personnel on a regular basis rather than outsourcing the drudgery directly. In fact, these alternates could be seen as benchmarks or baseline price for the unbundled option to build upon.

5.2 Sales Forecast

For lack of systemic seasonality, one straightforward way of depicting the time patterns would be to deploy the weighted moving average (WMA), with arbitrary relevance weights applying to the lagged values subject to expected annualized growth rate:

E(S_t )=[ω*S_(t-1)+(1-ω)*S_(t-k) ]*(1+g/12),∀ k∈(1..t)

On second thought, for sales expected to soar, the g rate would be too high for the linear approximation of the 1/12th power root to apply. Somehow, it is important to appreciate that, much like any project management confronting the control stage in the aftermath of prior planning, the sales figures will be updated annually so as to adjust the master budget to the flexible-budget figures. The resultant variances, single-shot or cumulative, will net out based on the actual baseline sales likely to affect the ex-post growth rates.

The rest of the pro-forma forecasting could be tied in to sales subject to a host of interim performance ratios. Apart from the regular financial and investment ratios to be treated at length later in text, these will involve EBITDA to sales, CoS to sales revenues, and SG&A to sales, to name just a few. Cost of Sales will be targeted as a flat ratio in order to build in some sustainability to our working capital (WK) management. Likewise, EBITDA will contain some after-tax constituent of depreciation that could be treated as one source of reinvestment financing because this deductible does not directly detract from liquidity while still having to be recouped from the standpoint of break-even efficiency. In a sense, depreciation cushion could be treated on par with WK savings, if only because the two add up indiscriminately when arriving at the operating cash flow. Finally, Selling, General and Administrative expenses could be one further layer of overhead whose level need only be closely linked to the break-even or minimum-efficiency sales without being correlated to perceived value in the interim.

5.3 BEP Analysis

Conventional break-even point (BEP) analysis features the minimum efficiency or baseline sales level that may serve the dual purpose as a target and a conservative scenario alike. The basic idea is to come up with a sales notch or output hurdle equating the price and the total cost per unit:

P*X=FC+VC*X
X=FC/(P-VC)

For an all-digital or online mediated setup, the overhead could be assumed very low indeed, even though the executive compensations and minimum headcount remunerations would still affect the fixed cost. Alternatively, the latter could largely be made up of the depreciation accruing to premises and key earnings assets such as housekeeping technology and toolkit replacements. In that case, all of the above salaries and wages could be allocated into the variable-cost aggregate, or its direct-labor cost subtotal. In any event, these compensations have to be competitive enough, as the upper bound, for our ‘internal customers’ or key stakeholders such as employees to stay put. The lower bound would amount to either China’s GDP per capita or its service-sector earnings to labor force or employment share.

It should be kept in mind that, for the optimistic scenario, the minimum efficiency scale could be lower rather than higher, as the denominator would feature a price growing at a faster rate relative to the variable cost. Alternatively, if we are to keep the compensations right up our incentives-compatibility alley motivationally, the resultant BEP scale may be left intact amidst growing price, thus securing more profitable revenues in line with higher quality or perceived value of our core ‘products.’ The two scenarios could be mixed as follows:

S=X ̂*P ̂=FC/(P*k_1-VC*k_2 )*P*k_1

The k1 and k2 refer to potentially differential growth factors for price versus direct (marginal or variable) costs. Evidently, this amounts to the baseline case if and only if the two factors converge. Otherwise, price lagging behind direct costs would render whatever entry strategy less than competitive or sustainable.
As it happens, the services profile would pose its own constraints on how direct costs could be allocated. In fact, regardless of whether the actual team performance could be split into individual order delivery contributions or hours put in, the effective scale X may have to be inferred based on the total rather than unit variable cost:

X=FC/(P-VC/X)=(FC+VC)/P

5.4 Working Capital Management & Implicit Profitability

In a well-defined sense, BEP analysis resembles the notion of net present value (NPV) as an intertemporal valuation or time-value counterpart. Likewise, the internal rate of return (IRR) could be thought of as implicit profitability securing a zero NPV, or keeping the effective discounted earnings streams just equal to the initial outlay. Along these lines, some related yet distinct profitability indicators could be addressed additionally. For instance, the profitability index (PI), as the ratio of NPV to the initial outlay, could be referred to as the earning quality of the fixed assets. By contrast, not only could that of working capital be gauged in a similar fashion, it can moreover be controlled and augmented dramatically by means of imputed profitability. The latter pertains to delivery terms or cash conversion cycle and WK float, whereby we entice customers to pay early in order that they could keep their savings discretionary (Damodaran, 1997, p. 378):

IP=〖(1+∆P/(P-∆P))〗^(365/(30-15))-1

Suppose our delivery terms are 5%/15 net 30, meaning we stand a 5 percent off the bill for any payment no later than 15 days, which has to be made within one month’s time anyway.
Discounts as accruing to sales credit, or buying on account, map into effective profitability in ways suggesting that prompt payment discipline on their part amounts to an equivalent of the first or early move advantage for us. In fact, it is this minimum profitability implied that could be seen as the maximum cost of debt (CoD) to be employed as part of WACC discounting—which in actuality should turn out far below that for all practical purposes.

5.5 Interim Ratios & Budget Targeting

At this point, it is straightforward to put together all of the above. For starters, the BEP sales will enter the WMA pattern as a baseline or period-zero level. Feasibility analysis points to the possibility for us to avail ourselves of a credit line totaling up to a USD 100,000—which translates into an overhead upper bound of 100,000/5=20,000 based on a straight-line method (SLM) of accounting for depreciation over a five years’ time span. Now, this may or may not coincide with the payback period; yet, should the latter prove shorter for valuation purposes, this would imply a non-zero terminal value (TV). We also plan on hiring one managing director as a makeshift solution to reconcile operations and governance alike. The latter dimension suggests he or she will serve on supervisory board while being an executive bootstrapping over the CEO and CFO faculties. That will fetch him or her a compensation package just under the double pay at 30,000 per annum. At the operations end, suffice it to hire two employees for a total payroll of 2*10,000=20,000.

At that rate, the fixed costs would total, 20,000+30,000=50,000 against the variable cost of 20,000. In fact, this cost structure could be sustained as a target ratio of VC/FC=20,000/50,000=.4 to be deployed throughout. Related ratios for the COS versus operating costs and respective gross versus operational margins readily obtain. Among other things, SG&A would amount to the executive compensation of 30,000 for the baseline scenario—to be adjusted motivationally to actual sales performance as well as profitability.

For the purpose of BEP analysis with an eye on a services profile, the total cost sum counts more heavily, though. That said, although the actual ‘price’ or average billing is of second-order relevance under a BO strategy building heavily on perceived value and imputed profitability, in any case the higher the price, the smaller the efficiency scale we have to maintain while still reporting a superior bottom line. Suppose the effective price is adjusted upwards to the delivery-implied profitability. Although delayed delivery impacts our cash flows and WK adversely, the valuation effect may still net out to a favorable differential due to the income add-on:

X ̃*P ̃-X*P-X*P*30/365=X*P*[1+IP-(1+30/365)]

This impact is negligible as long as the imputed profit equals the delivery gap. In fact, this could imply the cut-off for our delivery terms, A/Rs discount included. Other than that, the sales revenue for the BEP baseline is price invariant in totaling FC+VC=70,000. This amount overlooks the direct materials, yet the corollary should be straightforward: The operating costs set the baseline hurdle, for the WMA procedure not least. CHARTS 5A-B features pro-forma projections for the sales revenues based on a near-optimum discount rate of just under 1 percent. This means the imputed WK profitability will not make that much of a difference compared to alternative perceived value based pricing.

Financial Analysis

6.1 Economy: Further Analysis

China’s economy has been growing at a solid 7% down from the initial 8% annually over the past five years (World Bank, 2014), which deceleration could largely be due to over-investment within the core model as well as the hurdle effect computationally. Although total populace has been nearly stagnant, urban dwellers have accounted for a steady growth at 3%, which trend is likely to sustain thus diluting the overall growth prospects toward about 4% in terms of GDP per capita (EXHIBIT 6A). The services sector has already contributed as much as 46% to the overall value added as well as growth, which means saturation has been drawing near—albeit still too far off compared to the OECD benchmarks. In fact, that only lends further relevance to a BO strategy reaching beyond the conventional, intense-rivalry setup.

At the same time, inflation and unemployment have been stable enough to secure a happiness index, or the residual of their sum against unity, in excess of 93%. In fact, that gives us every reason to expect the urban growth rate for GDP per capita should be an accurate estimate for the core sales growth. That said, the Hang Seng China Enterprises (HSCE) index has soared another 46.75% YoY (Hong Kong SE, 2015), which might pose a prohibitive expectations hurdle on the required rate of return (RRR) or WACC:

CoC=WACC=α*CoE+(1-α)*CoD*(1-tax)

Although a major correction is possibly looming large, that will have been compressed as a matter of automatic stabilizer, bearing in mind that we start off with maximum leverage while converging to greater weights of equity capital very smoothly. Therefore, the cost of capital (CoC) or WACC will effectively collapse to CoD, or the lending rate of 5.6% initially. Later on, presuming loan is amortized about as fast as the underlying fixed assets get depreciated, the longer-term equity discount will converge to a modest 3.88% trailing average over a comparable history, as the leverage weight decreases. Better yet, the effective cost of debt will be subject to tax savings, which oscillate anywhere in between the 11% as a share of GDP for Chinese residents versus 30% corporate tax for ex-pats. In other words, the WACC discount rate will hover within the 3.88% versus 4.45% brackets.

6.2 Income Statement (P&L Account)

Mention was made of the core sales estimates following the WMA pattern subject to the respective net growth rate. By contrast, the operating margin will be driven by the selfsame real business cycle (RBC) or growth rates indirectly, insofar as these affect the time relevance parameter. At that rate, regardless of the sales scale, profitability can vary depending on value relevance rather than cost capping per se. Since the direct labor and overhead are known in advance as part of the CoS and operating costs at large, the direct materials cost could be inferred as the residual while pointing to the fact quality of inputs and potential net income margin are correlated both ways. Again, SG&A expenditures will be separated from the operational overhead, with the motivational component linked to margin performance.

6.3 Balance Sheet

It has been demonstrated that an optimum sales discount is immaterial emotively, and anyway we are not targeting either price shoppers or prestige buyers. Ours is a value type audience whose perception is more rationally time laden than emotive. Therefore, it does not pay ever to sell on account, which suggests accounts receivables will either be very low or otherwise balanced by accounts payables toward a very short conversion cycle or WK float. By contrast, inventories will be closely related to direct materials as a proportion.

6.4 Statement of Cash Flows

The indirect method suggests our cash streams as well as balances will not be affected materially by the change in the WK float, or the A/Rs versus A/Ps differential. Although inventory growth will exert some negative pressure most of the time, it is EBITDA after tax that makes up the bulk of the operating cash streams.
The loan repayment or amortization as financial type outflows will only affect valuation based on free cash flows to equity (FCFE), but not that to firm (FCFF). In the latter case, there is no need to have accounted for interest payments explicitly in the first place, unlike in the income statement, because these have been embedded in the full-blown WACC. On the other hand, we assume away any incremental investment outlays, too, on the presumption that we have chosen a representative investment horizon, perhaps aligned to the ‘13th five-year plan,’ after which time the project could be either replicated or reduced to a terminal value (TABLE 6C).

6.5 Valuation

The terminal value, if any, could combine the residual or net fixed asset value or the Gordon perpetuity of the CF/WACC sort for an average cash flow reinvested and discounted indefinitely, or both. Regardless of whether the residual or salvage market value is zero, or with TV assumed away altogether, the project boasts an enviable IRR as high as 88%. This level of internal profitability far exceeds the 4% RRR hurdle, which means that the payback period is shorter than one year, marking the project as a superb pick or ‘strong buy’ if we were to raise equity funds . An NPV of 496,251 suggests a PI of nearly 500%, which figure would still be very high around 215% suggesting a near 60% IRR, if the initial outlay were to double thus reflecting a WK requirement load or an entry fixed cost possibly capturing the efficiency scale, along with the salaries.

In actuality, though, there exists the margin constraint to boosting direct labor cost as opposed to executive salaries. In this setup, they can only go up by as much as 50% to accommodate a scale expansion of 100%–unlike in the less saturated prior setting. Therefore, the more realistic figures for IRR and PI would be, 45% and 1.71 for a 50% scale increase and a 20% wage raise.

Whatever wage growth rate or incentives scheme opted for, the resultant figure should still exceed the GDP per capita on a nominal (around USD 8,000) or PPP (USD 14,000) basis, as one pillar of competitiveness and morale reinforcement.
Interestingly, the after-tax EBITDA component of the cash flows by the end of the 5-year horizon would not change very materially, totaling some 122,000 slightly down from 133,000 amidst major adverse change in the fundamentals. In other words, the model should remain reasonably robust and immune to macroeconomic and institutional shocks. Not least, it has been assumed from the outset that the market will progressively reach saturation thus revealing deteriorating sales. Still, the cash flow pattern is smooth enough to offset the initial year-one loss without positing any extra WK or solvency constraints. Changing leverage has not affected the WACC very materially due to the similar effective values for CoD versus CoE based on a beta anywhere near

Somehow, the long-term CoC tends to the ongoing interest rate of 3.6% which was sliced by about 2% a few weeks ago (The Economist, 2015). What is more, the enviable IRR suggests enough flexibility to get around the issue of distributed or irrational valuations earmarking China’s smaller companies with an eye on the investors’ reportedly disparate training backgrounds, if we are to trust The Economist’s recent account (S.R., 2015).

6.6 Analysis of Ratios

When it comes to short-term solvency analysis, the current and quick ratios are not applicable by design, due to the very short conversion cycle or WK float whereby no year-end or average payables are posited. At the same time, the quality of WK management could be judged based on the ratio of net WK to current assets, which value converges to just under 2% by the end of year 5 down from the initial 12.4%. This means ever lower WK requirements, or indeed its better utilization. However, the interest coverage deteriorates as well, due to the increasingly compressed margins amidst flat interest payments.

Investment efficacy features a more complex agenda, with return on net assets versus equity co-moving and converging because of the vanishing leverage. However, the initially superior returns were not all due to financial leverage per se. Nor have these been accounted for by the operating leverage, or the ratio of total overhead to variable costs, which figure has shown to be remarkably sustainable in between 2.35 and 2.30. It is all the more interesting keeping in mind the evidently volatile asset turnover pattern, as captured in the sales to net total assets ratio reaching its high by year 2 and reverting back to the near-initial performance by the end of the project horizon.
Finally, at the capital structure end, the debt to equity ratio has converged to financial leverage weight much the monotonous way ROE and ROA did, which again points to complete redemption. An outcome like that would be all-coveted in an economy over-leveraged with non-performing loans—even though this, backed with hefty international reserves, appears less of an issue as compared to the prohibitive US sovereign debt overhang and its inefficient public policies leading up to stagnant GDP per capita.

PESTLE Based SWOT

This section addresses some of the external environment’s most salient facets that could come of relevance to the company’s internal environment over the short haul (strengths and weaknesses) as well as the interim layer or wide moat in the longer run (opportunities versus threats).

• Politics & Policies: China has attained its GDP leadership in PPP terms according to some estimates, with GDP per capita still lagging behind. The hidden-capacity strategy a la Sun-tzu is likely to outmatch the more aggressive ‘soft-power’ stakes as held by the US under Obama when it comes to unrevealed FDI and effective economy size. At the very least, this suggests large Chinese investors are not likely to fill in the minor niches or service-sector slacks within homeland domains, as the large-scale and long-term global projects count more heavily when it comes to a productivity turnaround along the “Go Global” strategy lines.
• Economy & Environment: The two-tier or dual yuan-Renminbi (CNY/RMB) currency system has long built in the bulk of forex stability, which renders the issue of exchange rate hedging a second-order one. The flipside is that capital constraints are unlikely to entice either FDI or portfolio type investments from the outside, so long as the managed devaluation curbs the expected FX translation payoffs for the ex-pats. That implies foreign entrants should not inconvenience our startup, either. For that matter, since we are not likely to generate a lot of negative externalities by the nature of our business, the goodwill is unlikely to hinge on just how apt we prove at recouping the social costs other than domestic chemical spillovers that are not closely monitored anyway.
• Society & Sustainability: It was shown previously how each and every segment of relevance reveals inter-generational heredity, which amounts to natural and consistent diversification. China is a very ample market showing enough capacity to absorb a derivative demand for our services. On the other hand, it is a ‘high-context’ society placing a high value on reputation and rapport, which means starting up from scratch would be no easy thing to square even in a geographically fragmented and socially stratified milieu. By contrast, a success scenario would allow for organic expansion throughout the Beijing–Tianjin–Liaoning region, which is likely to keep growing at a faster-than-average and accelerating pace due to agglomeration synergies.
• Technology: Our profile is reasonably conservative and need not be cutting-edge from the standpoint of technology or materials, which suggests no ‘fast-cycle’ type edge that has to be chased incessantly. On the other hand, we stand ready to source top-quality inputs as a matter of signaling health concerns to our immediate customers and the nearby community as the broader stakeholder.
• Legal & Institutional: China is likely to keep deploying a variety of ‘strategic protectionism’ tools that may well prevent the outside rivals from entering the marketplace without necessarily curbing the competition within. It is for this reason that our BO strategy should come in handy—more so given that it is difficult to mimic as a whole whilst nearly futile to adopt in partial fixes.

Strategic Recommendations

In fact, our key growth stake pertains to the construction cluster known to have accounted for the bulk of demand and job creation. Although the residential segment is likely to expand in the urban neighborhoods faster than in the rural or suburb areas anyway, still we might want to tap the B2B or commercial property niche when it comes to special and tech-intensive offers. In any event, the demand or relevance factor will likely correlate with the vacancy rates inversely.

The retail or B2C layer could be leveraged with respect to the long-booming tourism into the Oceania and Pacific destinations. In that case, sales forecasts will be laden by the breakdown of travel into the vacationing versus business trip slots—again with an eye toward hotel booking or vacancy rates.