"The specific barrier is capital," says Lisa George, global head of the Macquarie Group Foundation. "Without access to capital, it's very hard to get social mobility and educational mobility in life."
"We had to pivot," Tse told Fortune, "by grouping our markets not by their 'market development' stage, but by their 'COVID development' stage." In just 12 hours, her team abandoned the traditional model that grouped Chinese cities by the maturity of their consumer markets instead mapped operations around the pandemic: which provinces were entering lockdown, at peak restrictions, or reopening.
We are delighted to welcome Annette Male as head of agency for Facebook in APAC. The role of agencies has never been more important as clients adapt to the changing media landscape in pursuit of growth and digital transformation. Annette's experience will be an asset as we explore new ways to invest and enable agencies of all sizes to take advantage of our platforms and tools.
For all the talk of AI-driven productivity, many organisations still haven't seen wage costs fall or even clearly stabilise. In a recent PwC survey of more than 4,400 chief executives, only 12% said their AI investments had delivered both higher revenue and lower costs, while more than half reported no meaningful business impact at all. That gap between expectation and reality is becoming harder to ignore.
When former lawyer Zhang Zhan posted hundreds of videos from Wuhan during the chaotic early months of the COVID-19 outbreak, she became one of China's most prominent citizen journalists. Jailed in 2020 for "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" a charge Chinese authorities often use against journalists and activists she was sentenced recently to another four years for the same offense.
