You can definitely find dozens of people who is willing to pay premium price for good stuff.

sounds like a dud.

presumably the people/organizations who are in a position to pay 2000 lbs per year for Kynge's "analysis" have already retained a staff with with vastly more specialized--and dare i say "useful"--analytical skills to support their China operations.

of course, the real target audience are the legions of clueless Western managers shipped off to China-based offices with little more than a month of Berlitz lessons under their belts to help them better understand the country and culture that they've been sent to "conquer."

This isn't going to work. Making James Kynge the central if not only reason for charging (a lot) sounds like a huge mistake: there is too much good stuff on the Internet that is FREE already. The FT just has one man who can only have one set of opinions and as such I don't think that the service sounds valuable at all.

just by the look of the their website, i get the feeling they might be just going to piggy back on the research of others, adding a dash of original analysis -- the "insight" of James Kynge -- to justify the exorbitant fees they are going to charge.

the ft is a great brand, and they are trying to lever that brand as much as they can, even by going into areas where perhaps they shouldn't be going.

but if they can make money out of it, good on them.

disclosure: i know nothing except from crampton's video and a casual browse of the actual website.

thomas crampton starts every interview with 'So...'

it is beginning to grate

@might be nitpicking but

Yes, I agree! I have been trying to stop it. You have motivated me to try harder.

In the world of finance, even today, 2000 pounds - less than 3000 USD - is peanuts for a year's worth of insight. This is a business model that other smart people use successfully - the only difference is that this time, it's backed by the FT brand.

Hi Alxandra
But is the point not that similar insight can be got for free or for much less (the economist for example)?

Also, are the opnions of James Kynge (which appears to be the USP) really worth so much? I am not in the financial industry so am not sure of his reputation but are any China-based journalists capable of carrying such a heavy subscription (especially in the light of my first point).

Overall, I think it is a big gamble.

@Mike
I disagree. There is so little risk with this model. The only real cost is promotion, salary and web platform. There is no distribution cost, etc.

Don't underestimate the willingness of a CEO in China for three years to pay top dollar to be informed.

Considering that the finance community (rightly or wrongly) is looking at China to recover first out of the major world economies, the timing of the product's release is pretty good.

In finance people are more than happy to spend a hell of a lot of cash on what they think is good information. And the benefit for that is you don't need that many subscribers to make it a profitable operation (e.g. 100 subscribers = £200,000).

The FT already has this kind of product - Merger Markets and Debt Wire are this kind of high cost subscription model.

I think Kynge's role is a selling points, but he's editing right? I thought that the draw for the China Confidential is that it has exclusive content from famous sources.

But as someone pointed out to me today - considering that the first issue has a contribution by one of the most publicity hungry people in Asia's finance industry - it makes you wonder how exclusive the content is.