Zhi Tan President of Focus Media

As the first speaker at HYSTA 2007, Zhi Tan is very different from the rest of entrepreneurs at the conference. He invested 2 million dollars in a very small elevator advertisement poster company and acquired the total 8 companies in that industry in the following one year, then his company was acquired by Focus Media fro over 100 million dollars in stock. When the deal was closed after 6 months, the deal went up to over 500 million dollars due to stock appreciation. This is just an amazing story. Like Zhi Tan repeated said, "no technology, great return in one year", which was jealously joked by Wei Guo, CEO of Digital China, that "if every business is like Zhi Tan's, the business world would be great."

I think there are many business opportunities similar in every industry in China. Almost for 90% industries in China, the market is highly fragmented. The management doesn't have vision, experience, and knowledge to run a large business. The operation is not efficient. There are a lot of consolidation business opportunities. The franchise business start becoming really popular in China in the last few years. I'm not sure how it goes.

I overheard Zhi Tan's white hair is from when he studies PhD at Boston. It seems getting a PhD degree is way harder than growing 2 millions dollars to 500 millions dollars in 18 months.