Any business ideas that would give me the opportunity to travel to China and Korea often? I don’t want to live there but I want an excuse to visit China and Korea at least once or a few times a year.
I have friends in both countries and I only speak some basic mandarin, I have a good amount of capital and I want to make a shit load of money too.
Apologies if this is too ambiguous or sounds like a gay larp.
>I have a good amount of capital and I want to make a shit load of money too
Obviously this entails extremely high risk, to the point that you're almost guaranteed to fail. On the opposite end of the spectrum, getting 4% investing in bonds is guaranteed success.
Therefore, you need to go big. Both China and Korea lack Western-style strip clubs, particularly any catered to a foreign crowd. Don't buy existing clubs, which are sold at high revenue multiples. Instead, rent empty warehouses, defunct cafes, etc. Hire local designers (music, lighting, floorplan), dancers, security, bartenders, and a contract lawyer. You'll need a liquor license, and depending on the jurisdiction, an adult entertainment license. All told, this will cost about $50K - way cheaper than buying an existing establishment. If you're interested, I'm in this biz and can drop an email.
Well I’m interested. A business like this is something that is very locally focused so I’m not sure I’d be able to manage it properly since I don’t live there. But yeah, please drop an email an I’ll reach out tomorrow and we can discuss more details. Right now I’m into the brainstorming phase just so you understand too.
Also curious, since regular prostitution is pretty common, how do you see strip club standing out?
The Chinese will fuck you over six ways to Sunday if you do that.
This. The night scene is triad run. Good luck with that shit.
The triad doesn't fuck with foreigners.
Of course it fucks with foreigners. They use foreigners all the time for front business shit or to do their bidding without dirtying their hands.
https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/6/163318/Taipei-court-upholds%C2%A0jail-for-Israeli-Oren-Shlomo-Mayer,-and-Ewart-Odane-Bent-for-gruesome-murder-of-Canadian
Ask yourself how the only taiwanese guy in this story got away with literal murder even though he's the one who bought the murder weapon, got released for lack of proof LITERALLY THE DAY AFTER, and was arrested again once there was proof that he posted his bloodied hand on instagram the night of the murder.
The only guy with 100% proof that he did that shit and he still only got what, 18 months. His job ? worked a club. The black dude was a bouncer in the same club. Now this story is in Taipei and it's the one i know the most (notably because i saw said bloody hand on instagram the day of the murder) but this shit's all over EA. The triad uses foreign drug dealers (the canadian, shlomo and bent were just that) to push their shit and work tightly with nightclubs so the products are sold smoothly.
This made burst out laughing for a good 3 minutes. Thank anon.
Seriously what's wrong with their idea?
A random dude on sighsee asks for 50k for you to basically be a silent partner for a shady business in East Asia and you're wondering what's wrong ? Were you the kind that willingly went into the van to suck the guy's dick and only then be flabbergasted at the idea that there was no candy ?
English teacher ;D
Doing business in China means that money you make there cannot leave China.
Just go there as a tourist. Visa is not hard to get.
Not exactly, plenty of businesses use factories in China. Other people work for multinational companies
I usually never answer in an honest fashion in these threads because I never take them seriously and I believe that the people who can actually answer this question in a competent way would rather be paid for it. But fuck this, i'll just give you a freebie and you fuckers should definitely screencap it and keep that if you're young adults who do not really know how this shit works and want in, because there were a few people who did it for me when I was on sighsee, and in the same place as you.
In an nutshell, the answer is more mundane than you might think, and it is : IT DEPENDS. It depends on your current skill level, it depends on who you know, it depends on how much money you currently have and most importantly it depends on your ability to navigate these circles in a profitable way. But let's say you have "enough" money and you know a few people that might show you around and let's get started.
If you only have a few friends in the country, that won't do you any good. You need some solid connections and you need to be able to clearly visualize your options -both things you currently cannot do because you're just not there. You can only make these connections if you have boots on the ground, therefore, you need to be there for a little while, at least 6 months.
cont.
During which you will not be just out there partying and cooming, but looking for ideas and basically establish the current state-of-the-art in the field you'll decide to specialize in. But how do you do such research work ? There are many, many ways to do so, and some you can already do from the comfort of your home before leaving the country( but they obviously won't be enough) :
1) Online expat boards full of boomers who have their own business. Ask around what kind of business they're in, maybe set up a thread for that. A lot of them will humblebrag and complain about how the field they're currently in is dying. Disregard them, they all do that. You're basically doing basic market research at this stage and that kind of source is extremely unreliable
2) Meet ups and professional/entrepreneurial forums/fairs. These need you to be physically there and meet up with people. Get some business cards and start exchanging them with people, maybe a CV. You can also just talk to the people you can meet during these social events and see how things go. Fields can range from anywhere from High tech to industrial to even fucking wine imports. Just look. For example, Shenzhen's Hi Tech fair happened this november. open a calendar, start piling all the events you can look for, so you can plan for when to come to East Asia.
3) Once you know all these people and actually act interested and follow up with their stuff, opportunities will arise, and you'll have enough knowledge on these matters to actually act accordingly. I can't be more detailed because this step is highly situational.
cont. (3/3)
4) If you want more opportunities to arise and befriend more people, speaking the local language will be very important (almost a necessary condition imho, unless you want to deal with seedy people who will try to hustle you, bother foreign and local). Korean is far easier than Chinese, but China/Taiwan may have more opportunities.
5) develop your skills so you can look more professional and not just like a rich dude on coke. Project management (very important), sales (extremely important to know how to pitch), the basics of upper (strategic) and middle (tactical) management (so you don't look like a complete idiot). And of course, mandarin/korean.
You can start with 5 right away. Look for textbooks on the matters i've mentioned, you can find those for free, and take online classes for mandarin and korean. If you don't want to, imagine you're pitching to be a new business partner to yourself, an alter ego that has the money you have. Would you actually invest in a guy that has only superficial technical and situational knowledge as well as a bad drive of the language of the country where said "partner" would work in ? You have to build yourself in such a way that you can trust yourself with your own money. Otherwise you're just setting yourself up for failure.
Thanks for the info man. Totally makes sense. It’s not easy for me to travel to China right now but I might be able to do so more often in the future. Good news is that I have family ties in China which could really help out.
Good summary.
You realize you don't need a business in Korea or China to visit, right? There's a thing called "tourism". And don't come to sighsee looking for career advice unless you want to end up sleeping in a cardboard box.
I made 450 grand last year thanks to sighsee telling me 10000 times to learn how to code. Thanks guys
not sure why everyone on here is so fixated with korea, it's fucking boring after a while
but if you're desperate to eat kimchi just get a job with samsung in your home country and make it known that you are interested in working on an overseas assignment for a bit
or you could do what i did for a few years and get a contract with a company that is a supplier to lots of asian tech companies which enables you to travel to lots of countries
The fact that Korea was a complete shithole, among the poorest countries in the world, before the 70s, has been totally memoryholed. As a reminder, the southern half of the peninsula, known today as South Korea, was a rural shithole with nothing much going on. Actually most of the history and culture was in the northern part.
People think it’s Japan-lite, while it’s more similar to Mini-China-lite; even China’s main cities nowadays completely blow the fuck out of Seoul.
Kpop truly is a mistake.
You need to either be part of the Traids or the communist party to make any modicum of money in China. If you're not either of those you'll fail at worst and earn just enough to live a basic life while your fixed costs nourishes the CCP member or triads.
Anything related to IT hardware and data centers
I do have a tech background but nothing hardware. And also have spent a lot of time in Shenzhen and know people there. I might start looking into that area then
I come from a science/computer background, so I'm used to working on concrete problems with a non-abstract solution. Business people seem to condense money out of the air they breath. Importing/exporting, manufacturing, trading - it's the grunts that do the work and they have to be paid, so how does the man behind the desk still profit without doing everything himself?
One business that's always puzzled me is McDonald's - they sell cheap products all over the world and you'd think they be in the red after paying their employees, heating/electrical bills, etc. Its revenue in 2021 was 23.22 billion US dollars. They have 38,000 locations globally. This means each location makes about ($611k / location / year) which is ($1674 / location / day) which is about ($70 / location / hour). Using an American $7.25 minimum wage (McDonald's has 13.8k locations in the USA, and other Western countries have a comparable min. wage), and using 5.5 employees on the clock / hour, you are left with $70 - (5.5 * $7.25) = $30. Per year, that is $262k for other expenses like burgers (they come from somewhere), vegetables, oil, transportation, new windows the punks smashed, water, electricity, PLUS many other unforeseen expenses. For ALL your locations. HOW!?
Some of my assumptions must be drastically inaccurate. I must not know business at all, and over estimate expenses.
I have the same issue with city budgets, I often think how expensive infrastructure maintenance (repaving roads, pipes, sewers, snow removal, salting roads, garbage removal, etc.) is. There is no way the 2 billion dollar budget my city has can cover all of that. Just repaving 1 km of road is over $300k.
Business people are either insanely dumb or insanely brilliant.
The only think that makes sense to me in terms of making easy profits is arbitrage (alibaba sells plastic shit for 1/10th the price as in the west), computer programs because basically you spend money to create your product, then the majority of expenses are completed and customers pay huge $ for applications and services that are easy to lock them into (business contracts but also SW incompatibility)
Adult entertainment venues are fronts for illicit activities 99% of the time. You cannot just show up and participate at a large scale without being noticed.
Even in places like Thailand or Philippines where opening a girlie bar is relatively trivial, there are still surprising, dangerous, and expensive hurdles.