Since April, it's been Hiroshi Yoshioka's job to fix the TV business. Yoshioka was appointed head of the Consumer Products and Devices division following a shakeup in the top management ranks. "I've been too busy," he told reporters at Sony's headquarters in Tokyo, on Nov. 25.

Yoshioka's top priority is to make TVs profitable by next fiscal year, through March 2011. That's no small feat. Citigroup Global Markets Japan analyst Kota Ezawa has forecast that the TV business will post an operating loss of $720 million this fiscal year, ending in March 2010. "We know we have to restore profit in our game and TV business," Sony's Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer said during a Nov. 19 news conference.

Cost cutting will be key. Sony now plans to outsource 40% of its annual TV output next fiscal year, from about 20% of the 15 million sets it expects ship globally this year. Taiwanese contract manufacturers Hon Hai Precision Industry and Wistron would mainly focus on producing Sony's smaller sets, which consumers in entry markets can afford but earn razor thin margins. Those manufacturers have the machines for stamping metal sheets and resins and other materials in-house--not to mention a less expensive work force--to produce TVs for a lower cost than Sony can.

Yoshioka isn't only taking an ax to his division. He's also adding features to TVs. Next year Yoshioka says Sony will sell its first TVs capable of playing 3D movies and games. He predicts that up to half of all Sony TVs could be 3D-ready in 2013.

Sony needs an online service to close the gap with companies like Apple and Amazon whose easy-to-use online services enhance their gadgets. The hope is that all of the online content available would differentiate Sony’s products from competitors. “Take LG or Samsung,” Kazuo Hirai, who heads networked products and services, said last week. “They have some great devices. No services.”

Last fall Sony experimented with the idea when it gave Bravia TV owners in the U.S. a chance to watch the Sony-made film Hancock, featuring Will Smith as a down-and-out superhero, before it was available on DVD. The company charged $9.99 for a 24-hour viewing period for a two week period. Sony will repeat the offer this year to test whether there was demand for movies after they had been shown in theaters but before their DVD release. Yoshioka wouldn't say whether Sony was negotiating with other studios.

Sony's TV output this year will be flat from the previous year. But Yoshioka thinks Sony can grab 20% of the global TV market, from around 13% now, by the fiscal year through March 2013. That will require a big jump in production and a push into emerging markets such as China and India--without new factories or equipment. "We don't have a plan to increase our in-house capacity," he said.

Market researcher DisplaySearch predicts that manufacturers will sell more than 200 million LCD sets in 2013. Sony's output would come out to around 40 million sets--or roughly 40% annual production growth over the next three years. Sony wouldn't give specific unit-sales forecasts. It's easier to boost market share than profitability, said Paul Semenza, senior vice president at DisplaySearch."The challenge for Japanese companies...is that the TV business is rapidly becoming commoditized," said Semenza. "So it is difficult to pick a niche and operate profitably in it. There are very few examples of this."

One reason for Sony's optimism: The company is overhauling its supply chain. A more disciplined system would prevent a pileup of TVs at factories or stores or anywhere in between. That might have saved Sony a small fortune months ago when it was struggling with rising LCD panel prices but falling retail TV prices--down nearly 30% from the previous year.

Sony seems to have learned from its missteps in product planning. Earlier this year, while Samsung and LG were offering a broad range of thinner, energy-saving TVs--with light-emitting-diode backlights--only Sony's top-of-the-line sets could compete. Sony's problem was that it didn't have the facilities to make the specialized sheets of glass. It was buying panels from Samsung or other suppliers and scrambling to find LED backlight manufacturers. The Korean TV makers were also benefiting from a weak currency which gave them a pricing advantage globally over Japanese manufacturers. By the time Sony recovered, Samsung and LG had won over buyers. To remedy the problem, Sony now plans to secure LCD panels featuring the latest technologies by investing about $780 million for a one-third stake in an LCD factory in western Japan that Sharp opened last month.

Analysts wonder if Sony can hit its targets. That's partly because other TV makers are counting on 3D and services to give their sets more cachet. "Considering Sony's rivals have similar strategies, we are not certain yet whether Sony will be able to achieve its goals," JP Morgan analyst Yoshiharu Izumi wrote in a Nov. 20 report.

And while outsourcing more TVs might help Sony rein in costs, it won't solve everything. By not having its own panel making facilities, Sony might be slower in getting new technologies to market, said Sweta Dash, TV analyst at iSuppli. The danger: not being first to the market with the latest cutting-edge products that can wow consumers and build brand loyalty.

Yoshioka would agree. He thinks it's crucial that Sony has its own unique TV technology. The company makes superclear organic light-emitting diode TVs but only for 11-inch sets because of the tough technical hurdles to mass produce them. Yoshioka said Sony engineers are already at work developing something new. When asked to explain, he smiled and said: "Next time."

That kind of minority role would have worked well for BAIC. As my colleague Ian Rowley wrote in September, when BAIC first made its deal with Koenigsegg, Chinese automakers have typically not been all that successful in their attempts to expand beyond China. And as BusinessWeek columnists Anil Gupta and Haiyan Wang wrote in August, BAIC "has no experience in mergers and acquisitions, whether domestic or cross-border. Success at postmerger integration requires highly cultivated and deeply embedded organizational capabilities. Such capabilities have to be built through experience. They can be neither bought nor rented."

That's why the Saab deal could have been such a good fit for BAIC. As a shareholder of Koenigsegg, the Chinese company would have been well-positioned to have its managers observe the integration process and gain the sort of experience that could help BAIC if or when it decided to do an acqusition of its own. Now BAIC won't have that chance.

It's easy to see why China's government is upset. According to a statement on the USCC website, the Report lists a series of Chinese sins. "Despite evidence that global economic imbalances helped fuel the financial crisis, China persists in maintaining a wide variety of industrial policies to support an export and investment-led growth model. China continues to accumulate record sums of foreign currency reserves as a result of large trade surpluses. These surpluses result, in part, from China's extensive web of subsidies to favored industries, which include tax rebates, low interest loans from state-owned banks, discounts on land, electricity and fuel, and a currency that is pegged to the U.S. dollar at an artificially low rate." The USCC goes on to describe "stepped up efforts by China to penetrate U.S. computer networks, particularly those of the U.S. government and contractors, and to obtain information by increasingly sophisticated espionage methods."

To be fair, the Chinese government does have a point: The USCC is biased. Under both Democratic and Republican presidents, the USCC has tended to take a harder line on China than the administration. That's natural, since congressmen and women from both sides of the aisle typically feel freer to take aim at Beijing than officials from State, Treasury, Defense or the White House. The 2000 law that created the USCC calls for it, among other things, to focus on issues such as proliferation, WTO compliance and "the implications of restrictions on speech and access to information" in China.

Still, the USCC doesn't have any actual authority, and Beijing is probably counting on Nancy Pelosi and other Congressional leaders to file the report away somewhere and ignore it. That Chinese strategy seems to have worked fine in the past: This is the seventh report by the USCC, after all. With the unemployment rate above 10% and an election year approaching, though, the latest report by this "commission" might prove to have legs. There's a lot of anger in America and voters might feel inclined to support candidates who want Washington to be more combative toward Beijing. China's government should keep that in mind in the weeks ahead as it follows up on Obama's visit by deciding whether or not to let the currency appreciate. Movement on the yuan would give Obama and his supporters on the Hill a chance to argue that the president's less confrontational approach to China makes more sense for the U.S.

Hirai, who unveiled plans for the service--tentatively called Sony Online Service--on Nov. 19, said he hopes for a release next year. "Earlier in the year would be a lot more preferable," he said, during an interview at Sony headquarters in Tokyo.

Since taking over in mid-2006, Sony's CEO and Chairman Howard Stringer has repeatedly said he wants to create a link between the company's electronic products and digital content such as music from Sony's recording label and TV shows and movies from Sony Pictures Entertainment. What's taken so long? "There was always a vision," Hirai said. But before Stringer appointed a new management team and changed the organization chart in February, the company was riven by too many warring factions, he added.

The new online service online is expected to see a gradual rollout to different Sony products. The company plans to have consumers register for the service the moment they pull a TV or music player out of the box. That would lock them in, much like Apple does with its iTunes Store. If done right, the online store concept could also win a following for the brand.

Hirai said Sony would take the iTunes idea a step further: social networking features. So consumers could use their online accounts to save home videos or photos they shot for friends and family to see. "It's not just access content, stream it, and enjoy," he said. "What are your friends watching right now? There's a screen that says all the programming that's available. It highlights all the things that your friends are watching, for example. It's a community experience."

The hope is that all of the online content available would differentiate Sony's products from competitors. "Take LG or Samsung," he said. "They have some great devices. No services."

The store has huge potential to become a fount of cash. Consider the PlayStation Network. The Web-based gateway for PlayStation 3 video game consoles has been Sony's most successful push into online commerce so far. Launched three years ago, the PlayStation Network has 33 million registered users and sells thousands of downloadable games, TV shows, and movies. It has helped win converts inside the company, Hirai said.

Sony expects the PlayStation Network to bring in $500 million in revenues this fiscal year through March 2010--triple last year's total. Add in the new online service and the hundreds of millions of networked products Sony expects to sell, and the company's revenues from downloads and other paid-for services on the PlayStation Network and the new online service could top $3.3 billion by March 2013, Hirai said.

The new online service will be based on the PlayStation Network. Sony will encourage gamers to sign on to the new service by letting them do so through their PlayStation Network accounts.

Still, there are plenty of things the company has to work out. For instance: Will users get to share their content with family? And how many gadgets will work with movies or music downloads that users have bought? "That debate is still going on," Hirai said.

And there are limitations to linking devices. You would download a movie to watch on your big-screen TV at home, a laptop, a portable gaming console or a cell phone. But you wouldn't do the same on a digital camera.

At some point later on, Sony might consider selling its products below the cost of manufacturing them, making up the difference with revenues from digital content and online services. "But the most important thing now is that we hit our revenue targets," he added.

Huntsman spoke mostly in English but he is fluent in Mandarin and spent a few minutes speaking in Chinese. It was during the Chinese portion of his speech that Huntsman called Sino-U.S. ties "the world's most important relationship." That recalls the famous description that Mike Mansfield, the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo during the 1980s, gave to Japan's relations with the U.S. Back then, Mansfield liked to say "the U.S.-Japan relationship is the "most important bilateral relationship in the world, bar none." Now that honor goes to Japan's giant neighbor. And oddly enough, Mansfield himself, the ultimate booster of Japan-U.S. ties, predicted this would happen. Consider this interview he gave to Japan's Nikkei newspaper ten years ago. Talking about his "bar none" description of ties between Tokyo and Washington, he said "I don’t know how long it’s going to last, though, because you have China on the horizon….China will become more powerful in the decades to come. So far, China has held its head above water better than Japan has and, in doing so, China has become something of a stabilizing factor in East Asia and in the rest of the world….China could be in a position to threaten Japan’s supremacy in Asia. That is the major reason for me to emphasize that it is essential for Japan to rebuild its economy quickly."

Japan didn't change quickly, though. China did. And now it's the U.S. ambassador in Beijing, not Tokyo, who gets to crow about the importance of his job.

Big deal, says one top tech analyst; there’s so much piracy in China, Microsoft barely sells anything in the country to start with. "The majority of operating systems in the market today are illegal copies, and the ones that are Zhongyi-related have an even smaller share of the market," Reuters quoted Edward Yu, chief executive of a China-focused technology research firm Analysys International, saying about the ruling. "So I don't think it will have much impact on Microsoft's business."

Yu's a smart guy whose firm does a lot of good work. Still, though, how do you measure the damage to the company’s brand and image in China as a result of this ruling? Assume, for the sake of argument, that the court is wrong, Microsoft is right and the company did nothing wrong. It still has suffered a big loss, as the court has muddied the waters: Microsoft more than any other American company has been pushing for China to crack down on software piracy, but now the software giant’s many critics can point to this ruling and say look, Microsoft violates IPR itself. Microsoft will appeal, so there’s a chance a higher court will overturn this ruling. In the meantime, though, Microsoft’s now in a weaker position in its endless fight against piracy in China.

Kia, controlled by Hyundai Motor, Korea’s largest carmaker, is confident it can increase its U.S. sales by double digits next year. The Korean company will offer four new models, including the completely redesigned Optima sedan and the Sportage crossover. “We are prepared to expand,” declares Thomas Oh, executive vice president in charge of Kia’s America business. Oh predicts U.S. sales of 350,000 vehicles next year, up from a projected 300,000 this year.

The optimism stems from the Korean carmaker’s outstanding performance this year. In the first 10 months, when the industry’s sales fell 25% in the U.S., Kia sold 261,000 vehicles there, up 7.2% from a year earlier. Company officials say Kia’s U.S. market share, which rose to 2.1% last year from 1.9% in 2007, is poised to top 3% this year for the first time. Taking advantage of its strong lineup of small cars and a weak Korean currency, Kia has managed to win customers from General Motors, Toyota and Honda. With the Korean won still about 19% weaker against the greenback than it was at the beginning of last year, Kia’s expansion story isn’t likely to end for a while.

Now it’s the turn of AUO (itself the product of an earlier round of consolidation) or the Koreans to make a move. Speculation is focusing on Chunghwa Picture Tube, one of the remaining smaller players in the Taiwanese market; according to this report in the China Economic News, “Samsung is eyeing CPT, one of its suppliers, since it can help the Korean firm penetrate the huge Chinese market, taking advantage of its manufacturing facilities in China and its close link with Chinese brands. Korean makers` interest in Taiwan`s TFT LCD firms was underscored by their courtship for Chi Mei, according to the statement of Shi Wen-long, founder of Chi Mei, during the press conference for the acquisition of Chi Mei by Innolux last Saturday.”

It will be especially interesting to see how AUO responds. I was at the company two weeks ago and interviewed C.T. Liu, chief of the company’s consumer display business. (See my recent BW story on Taiwan's tech sector for more.) He emphasized how AUO was trying to get away from relying on huge, capital-intensive factories. “We used to be a heavily invested in TFT-LCD [production]," he told me. “Now AUO is going in a completely different direction." He summed it up with the acronym SELECT, with each letter standing for a different direction: Solar; Energy service; Lighting; E-paper; Cars; and TFT-LCD.

We’ll now have the chance to see how committed AUO is to this new strategy. Will the company sit back and allow Hon Hai to become tops in Taiwan? Or will AUO try to regain its No. 1 position by going after CPt or another smaller rival? And will AUO be willing to allow Samsung to take over a Taiwanese rival and gain a better foothold in China?

My BusinessWeek colleague, Amy Feldman, wrote in this week's issue about a service that will soon be available in the U.S.: emailing money to friends and family.

In Japan, the service has been around since mid-2008. The first was launched by KDDI, the telco that runs au and Japan's second-biggest mobile operator. Its Jibun Ginko (My Bank) service, which started in July 2008, requires that mobile phone subscribers open an account and deposit money, as they would at an ordinary bank.

How common is it to email money from phones? KDDI says 750,000 people have opened accounts so far. But only about 10% are regular users, so it's mostly early adopters who are taking advantage of the service.

Actually, no money is sent from phone to phone. The email message is just a proxy for the transaction, which takes place between banks over a secure network.

The money transfer service is free when it’s between Jibun Ginko account holders. There's also no charge if money is sent to a Mitsubishi UFJ Bank account. For all others, it’s 170 yen ($1.90) if the amount is less than 30,000 yen ($330)--about what you would pay for pulling out cash from a convenience store ATM in Japan--or 270 yen ($3) if the amount is 30,000 yen or more.

How much can you send using your cell phone? 10 million yen, or about $110,000. That's because KDDI’s Jibun Ginko operates as a bank, so the usual money transfer limits apply.

Which explains why DoCoMo limits how much users can send to another DoCoMo user’s cell phone number: 20,000 yen ($220).

Both parties have to be DoCoMo subscribers. But there’s no need to register or open a bank account with DoCoMo. And since DoCoMo (which is teaming up with Mizuho Bank) acts as the go-between, there’s no need to exchange bank account information--bank branch, account number, name--which is what you would need if you were wiring money from one bank to another. The recipient gets an email on his phone and has the option of depositing the money in a Japanese bank account or having the money credited to his monthly phone bill. The most anyone can receive is 200,000 yen ($2,200) per month. DoCoMo charges the sender 105 yen ($1.16) and the recipient 65 yen ($0.72). The charge is waived for the recipient if he deposits the money into a Mizuho Bank account or credits it to his monthly phone bill.

The first storm paralyzed Beijing Capital Airport, with hundreds of flights cancelled, leaving thousands of upset passengers milling throughout the airport, trying to rebook flights, find their checked baggage, or get their fares refunded. I was there for over six hours before giving up on finding a free seat on a flight to Shanghai and returned home. (I ended up flying out the next morning at 8:00 am.) The same scenario was repeated Nov. 12 with the Beijing airport once more in chaos, while others in Shijiazhuang, Hebei, Taiyuan, Shanxi, and Zhengzhou, Henan, were shut outright. Highways again were closed down. “We ordinary people can come with only ordinary suggestions,” wrote one commentator in the China Daily Nov. 13. “It's for the government officials to think and plan about the more intricate and complicated issue. And that is not a tough ask, given the advancement we have made in technology and communications,” the writer continued suggesting that television, Internet and mobile phone messaging, all could have been used to alert people about flight cancellations and warn them from taking to the highways. .

Also controversial: the widespread belief in Beijing that the government bears some responsibility for at least one of the big storms. And this is not just a crazy conspiracy theory either. The capital has a bureau actually called the Beijing Weather Modification Office. This organization gained a fame of sorts for their efforts to control precipitation during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. And the weather modification office “played a helping hand and "enhanced" the natural snowfall to ease drought conditions in the city, after it had gone more than 100 days without rain,” a spokesman said, according to the China Daily. Reportedly, 84 packages of silver iodide were fired into the clouds helping bring down the snow during Beijing’s first storm. “I believe it is not a question of improving government efficiency and cooperation among different departments, but a question of respecting the rights of the people. That should always be the basis of any government decision,” the China Daily piece editorialized Nov. 4.

The deal, which includes $38 million in cash, and another $20 million if the privately held, unprofitable McCamish is able to achieve pre-set targets in the next three years, is an acknowledgement that Infosys needs to ramp up its game in the BPO business, which currently contributes less than 1% to its revenues.

Infosys executives have said in the past that they hope to have that contribution reach as much as a fourth of the $5 billion outsourcing giants revenues.

But business process outsourcing requires a different skill set than the nearly 100,000 engineers that Infosys has, who spend most of their days developing software that allows companies in the U.S. to run their billing, inventory and manage systems like data from cell phone networks.

McCamish, for instance, handles some operations for U.S. insurance companies like the Nolan Financial Group and Heritage Union. Infosys will retain the employees at McCamish, but one can expect to see a lot of work-sharing between U.S. and Indian workers at Infosys.

Interestingly, even though Infosys has consistently said it is looking for acquisitions overseas, this is the first move it has made in the past two years to buy anything, despite the fact that it is sitting on around $2 billion of cash, all thrown off by the highly profitable tech service work it does for western clients.

When I met with Infosys executives in June, they had already been thinking about ways to diversify their revenues. Most of its customers had cut back on discretionary spending in 2008, during the recession, and the slowdown in its revenue growth - much of which is from short-term, piecemeal projects - had reminded Infosys leaders that it must step up its hunt for what the industry calls mega-deals, which are signed for 5 or ten year operations and measure in the hundreds of millions of dependable revenue, recession or not.

The BPO world in India is actually pretty scattered, compared to the tech industry, where the majority of work is shared between the three top players - Tata Consultancy, Infosys and Wipro - and a handful of smaller players like HCL. The BPO industry in India has few clear leaders, and none with the size and pull of the IT leaders. So for IT companies, already seeped in the culture of outsourcing technical work, it makes sense to grab a bit of BPO business, especially since foreign companies like CapGemini have done a great job of cornering the high-value deals in back-office work that flows to India.

Perhaps more importantly for Infosys, this acquisition helps show Americans that it is serious about investing in the U.S. and creating jobs there, considering the amount of flak that outsourcing companies have drawn in the past two years as U.S. employment numbers started to plunge.

Well, not exactly, but pretty much.

At the India Economic Summit Nov. 8, one of the many speak-a-thons that mushroom in New Delhi once the weather improves, Singh came out for a little bit of applause, a little bit of politics and little bit of wishful thinking.

The state of the Indian economy? "The worst is behind us."

The future of the Indian economy? "With a normal monsoon next year, we hope to achieve a growth rate of over 7 percent...Our medium term objective continues to achieve a growth rate of 9 per cent per annum."

Eradication of poverty, hunger and disease? " I am happy to say that we have delivered substantially on that promise. But the task is by no means (sic) unfinished." (I think he meant finished )

But there is news in between the platitudes. For instance, India's fiscal stimulus package, which measured anywhere between $50 and $80 billion, depending on how you count it, will be rolled back starting early next year. By most measures though, it was money well spent - government spending kept India's economy afloat when the private sector all but retreated last year. The effort almost broke the bank, though, and as the deficit climbed to 12% of India's $1.2. trillion GDP, it was clear there was no more where that came from.

Speaking of billions of dollars, Singh had just had a tete-a-tete with the Chairman of Wal-Mart's board, S. Robson Walton, and India's Commerce Minister, Anand Sharma, brought up Walton's enthusiasm for India as he totaled up foreign investment (some $35 billion for the twelve months ending March 2010, he estimated). Wal-Mart runs one store in India in a tie-up with Bharti, where it is allowed to sell only to shop-owners, not to customers. But when I visited that store earlier this year, in Amritsar in North India, not far from the Pakistan border, the lines ran out the door, the shoppers ooh-ed and aaah-ed at the prices, and the cash registers, literally, jingled. And even though organized retail is a puny little part of India's $450 billion retail industry, Wal-Mart has been lobbying India's government to open up foreign investment rules so that it can sell directly to customers.

Sharma is the shyer and less boisterous heir to Kamal Nath, who was India's last Commerce Minister, and is now relegated to drumming up foreign and state investment to build roads. It's an interesting study in contrasts - Nath made his name by holding up the last set of the Doha round of talks for a WTO-led global free trade pact, questioning the true intent of western investors. Now he flies around the world asking the same investors, if they will, please, help build a road in rural India.

Sharma, meanwhile, is the new face of Indian trade politics - reticent to speak his mind, even when egged on by reporters - and his appearance this week on the coat-tails of the Prime Minister underscores how closely Singh is monitoring the informal talks that continue non-stop. India's already signed a free trade agreement with South Korea, and with it's neighbors in the ASEAN region. By 2010, it might sign one with the European Union. That's a lot of ink in just a few months on the job.

But Singh speaks so rarely in public (the three public appearances in the last week notwithstanding) that any sense of direction from India's perpetually smiling economist-in-chief is helpful guidance for the over-eager markets, at least. The benchmark 30-stock sensex was up 300 points for the day, almost 2%. Bonds fell, and given the headlines in Monday's newspapers, Singh's stock rose.

That should go some way to assuage concerns that companies planning rivals to the Tata car are wavering. Two Bajaj executives, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told BusinessWeek recently that the company is finding it difficult to persuade suppliers to do the kind of aggressive research and development required to push down prices without a clear guarantee that it would produce a sizable number of cars, especially without an approved final design. Meanwhile, Nissan's executive vice-president for Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, Colin Dodge, told me at last month's Tokyo Motor Show that Nissan's input in the car is now minimal. "The project itself is very difficult," Dodge said. "Doing this car for around $2,500 and getting motorbike drivers to jump into four-wheel vehicles [is] very challenging…[but] the car is coming along."

Ghosn's comments suggest that, despite his leadership in the global push for electric vehicles, there is plenty of life in the project with Bajaj. Still, a few important questions remain. One is how many of the cheap vehicles will be built. In the original press release, Nissan said the car would be built at a plant in Chakan, Maharashtra, with an initial capacity of 400,000. As of October, Tata had only delivered 7,500 Nanos. Another is the price, especially if the Nissan-Renault-Bajaj car is sold outside of India. The Economic Times reports that Ghosn isn't sure if it will retail for $2,500 or $2,800 or $3,000. And, just as important for all involved, can they make any money selling such a cheap car?

The second piece of bad news is really just more of the same: another day of extremely high roadside pollution reported by RTHK radio this morning. A Hong Kong tourism official interviewed on the radio tried to put a brave face on things saying the problem—which he presumably thinks is only temporary-will go away soon. That’s little consolation for anyone visiting Hong Kong at the moment, where the average stay is just a few days. “The blight of air pollution is a tax on the whole tourism industry as it affects tourists during their visit and leaves a negative impression of the city that will affect their desire to return,” says Joanne Ooi, CEO of Clean Air Network, an environmental advocacy group focusing exclusively on air pollution in Hong Kong. “Reduced visibility leads to strong association with less developed cities like Mumbai that leaves a black mark on Hong Kong’s image.”

Equally important perhaps is that Hong Kong’s air quality leads to unfavorable comparisons with its regional rival Singapore which has has long benefited from its reputation as the cleanest and safest metropolis in Southeast Asia. More recently the Singapore government has made a big push to improve the city’s tourism attractions by hosting the Formula One race and allowing casinos to open their doors next year. Another selling point for Singapore: a Universal Studios theme park is also set to open in early 2010. Though smaller than Hong Kong Disneyland, its proximity to Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand will give it an advantage over Hong Kong.

But Shanghai is clearly the bigger threat to Hong Kong. Here’s what Parita Chitakasem, research manager at Euromonitor International in Singapore, who specializes in theme parks, had to say to me in an email. “Disneyland Shanghai will have two big features which will make it more attractive than its Hong Kong counterpart: although it is still early days, Disneyland in Shanghai will probably offer a much better experience for your money than Disneyland in Hong Kong – initial plans show that Shanghai’s Disneyland will be six times bigger compared to the current size of Hong Kong Disneyland, which is very small (only 16 attractions). Also, for visitors from mainland China, it will be much easier to travel to Disneyland in Shanghai, as there are no visa/cross border concerns to take care of.”

Still, the Shanghai project is still some years off. Indeed, the press release from Disney was short on details, saying it was in negotiations with the Shanghai government. The Burbank, California-based company will have a 40% stake in the Shanghai resort while the Chinese partners are as yet unnamed. But ff the experience of other U.S. corporations with joint ventures in China is anything to go by, Disney CEO Robert A. Iger is going to need a lot of pixy dust around to make things go smoothly.

Addendum:
Zhongnan University professor Sun Xiliang says on his blog on China.org says Disney needs Shanghai a lot more than Shanghai needs Disney.

Experts say there's no conclusive evidence that blue lights will do any good. "Train operators are desperate to do anything that will bring down the number of suicides," said Tsuneo Suzuki, a professor who specializes in color psychology at Keio University in Tokyo. "But there's no research that proves that blue lights will dissuade people from killing themselves."

Suicides are a common cause of disruption for Japan's railway operators. Last year, Japan recorded 32,249 suicides, a 2.6% fall from the previous year, according to National Police Agency statistics. Of the total, close to 2,000 people, or roughly 6%, had killed themselves by jumping in front of a train. Last year's figures were well below the record high of 34,427 set in 2003. So far this year, amid a recession and unemployment that's hovering near record highs, suicides appear to be on the rise again, with 24,846 reported through September.

On East Japan Railway's lines in Tokyo, suicides rose for the third straight year to 68 in the fiscal year through March--18 of them on the Yamanote line--from 58 the previous year. Company spokesman Koji Takano said the decision to use blue LED lights wasn't based on any researchers' specific findings.

In recent years, cities and railways operators have experimented with colored lights. In one highly publicized case, authorities in Glasgow, Scotland, put up blue lights in parts of the city, and later pointed to anecdotal evidence that crime had fallen. Last year, Japan's Keihin Electric Express Railway set up blue lights inside a station in Yokohama, just west of Tokyo. Other train operators have set up blue lights at railroad crossings.

Recently, officials from Tokyo-based private railway company Tokyu recently paid Keio University's Suzuki a visit to seek his advice about the psychological effect of colored lights. Forget about it, he said, not least because the lights would be switched off during the daylight hours. "I told them that I understood their concerns but that they won't solve a deeply rooted societal problem like suicide by putting up lights," he recalled. "If you showed that it was possible, you would probably win the Nobel Prize."