Consumer Trends in China’s Beverage Industry and Opportunities to Invest

Recently we wrote about our industry-insider approach to sourcing, which we believe provides a unique and growing pipeline of consumer opportunities by narrowing our focus on subsectors where we see strong brands, low penetration buyout rates and healthy margins. Within these subsectors we map out leading companies and approach businesses that score well on key […]

Meet Our Manager – Luke Luan

Luke Luan COO, Little Star Brands Group With over 20 years of experience in operations and an affinity for building businesses, I chose to join Little Star Brands Group as COO to oversee the Company’s sales, merchandising and retail operations for all the brands including Yeehoo, Peekaboo and Soho Baby. Having served as COO in […]

Sourcing Chinese Consumer Transactions

Our investment management process begins with our unique approach to sourcing transactions in our focus industries. The key component to our sourcing methodology is an industry insider approach: our management expertise and operational involvement in fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), apparel, accessories, specialty-retailing and related sectors provides us with the ability to identify and capitalize […]

Delivering Value Creation

Much of the discussion of our operational involvement in our portfolio revolves around growing top line revenues, controlling costs and streamlining decision making. These are goals that we must drive through deeper, more granular involvement in our companies.  This month we highlight some of the areas for improvement within our businesses that have been particularly […]

China VC: The Virtuous Circle

By Tim Burroughs   China’s VC market is evolving as funds started by or raised from founders of first-generation internet firms. Concerns about conflicts of interest must be addressed, but the influence of their ecosystems will grow.   Just over two years ago, Andrew Teoh passed up a role on Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group's […]

Maximizing Value through Building Platforms

Platform-building is woven into Lunar’s DNA. The business that began as Linktone in 1999 subsequently gave birth to two further companies, Intrinsic and SmartPay. Together they formed the bulwark of Fund I and each of the three has now been fully exited, generating attractive returns. Another platform-building opportunity arose when we acquired Yeehoo in 2011. […]

Incentivizing Minority Shareholders in a Buyout Deal

Chinese private equity has been overwhelmingly characterized by pre-IPO deals and growth capital investments whereby PE returns were driven by the deployment of investment capital, not human capital or sweat equity. Most firms lacked the culture, will and expertise to take on operationally challenging investments. Meanwhile the scale of buyout opportunities has grown, driven by […]

A Solution to Stress and Succession

Stressed out sextuginarian and septuginarian entrepreneurs are saddled with succession issues, as are their quadregenriarian and quinquagenerian brethren. A 2013 survey of privately-held small- and medium-sized private enterprises conducted by Shanghai Jiaotong University found that 70% will face succession issues within the next five to ten years, and less than 20% of next-generation heirs and […]

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