International Business Opportunities

After
EU,
Canada, and Japan also Mexico has asked to join a U.S. challenge of Chinese piracy and counterfeiting practices as a third party in World Trade Organization consultations.

The procedural step, indicates growing international pressure on Beijing to crack down on product piracy.

The U.S. filed a pair of new cases against China at the WTO last month. One of them, challenges Beijing’s rules for copyright and trademark protection.

There are several large companies already active in Second Life, including car maker Toyota, IBM and Reuters Group, however Brazil’s TAM is about to become the first airline to promote itself in this online virtual world.
It will offer cyberspace flights that correspond to its real-world international service.

TAM said it will offer avatars - users’ 3-D representations that, ironically, can fly on their own - gifts to take virtual TAM flights to Second Life islands called Milan, Paris, New York and England.
The islands represent the leading Brazilian airline’s actual international destinations.

“It’s more of an institutional marketing tool, for people to learn about the airline’s destinations, and for us to be present in this new online fever,”
a company spokesman said. (Source).

Japan and Chile have signed a free trade deal which will lower tariffs on a range of goods including cars, copper, fish, tea and wine.

The agreement, which is the first of its kind between Japan and a South American country, will reduce tariffs on the majority of goods traded by the two countries.
But it will not extend to farm products such as rice, which Japan is keen to protect.
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Presidents Felipe Calderon of Mexico and George W. Bush of the United States held a series of meetings yesterday, promising to extend the free trade agreement between the two nations.

Calderon told reporters after the talks that the two had agreed to set up working groups seeking a broader agreement, which will include sensitive products like corn and beans. Bush said that neither nation is seeking to weaken free trade, instead they are seeking to increase it and boost border security.
( full story)

In times where most of companies go offshore to cut costs, whether moving manufacturing plants or outsourcing to low salary countries, new fashion trends lead to new strategies in the apparel industry.

The concept that is going to have major implications for the supply chain of American retailers and on the manufacturing of apparel, as reported in the Newsweek article: A New Fashion Frontier - March 20 issue, is Fast Fashion.

Fast Fashion, for retailers means avoiding overstock and clearance sales, by introducing new items much faster than the norm, for shoppers means checking out the latest items weekly or even daily, rather than monthly. This typically European trend is now spreading out among the American consumers.

Top European retailers, such as H&M and Zara are moving rapidly into the U.S. market, as big American players, too big to copy the fast-fashion model from the ground up, are borrowing elements of it, moving from a seasonal cycle to something much faster.

Even though fast fashion remains a niche—it represented a little more than 1 percent of American market of apparel, H&M says the United States will be its fastest-growing market.

That could leads to shifting production for the U.S. retail market from China to less distant sites, like Mexico, in order to (more…)