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Strategies & Market Trends : Technology Stocks & Market Talk With Don Wolanchuk -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bull_dozer who wrote (137406)	5/3/2020 5:50:43 PM
From: bull_dozer	Respond to of 207307

What impelled you to make a trip together to China in 1995, and how has that trip affected your global business decisions since? GATES: We went to China for a lot of reasons. Partly to relax and have fun. We found a few McDonald's there, so we didn't feel too far away from home. It was also exciting to go and see all the changes taking place, to see different parts of the country, and to meet some of the leaders. China is a market that Microsoft had already been investing in. We've upped that a lot since then. As a percentage of our sales, though, it's tiny--well under 1%--and so even though it will double every year for the next five years, it's really only by taking a ten-year view that we can say it's worth the emphasis we're putting on it. Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. BUFFETT: My family was amazed that I went. I never traveled beyond the outer reaches of the county in Nebraska. I had a terrific time and also confirmed my feeling that there's going to be a lot of Coca-Cola sold there in the future. I told everyone over there that it acts as an aphrodisiac. archive.fortune.com