Word: visas
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...balloting for this Sunday's All-Star game, over the Lakers' Shaquille O'Neal as the Western Conference's starting center. Yao isn't O'Neal's equal on the court, but he has surpassed Shaq in the estimation of blue-chip companies like Apple and Visa, which see Yao as the pitchman messiah who might finally open the wallets of China's 1.3 billion consumers. "Yao Ming is Tiger Woods," says Adam Silver, president of NBA Entertainment, the league's marketing, Internet, television and merchandising arm. "He's a much more sophisticated marketer than people give him credit...
...before Team Yao started mining the report, companies were at the door. "We chose him because we just thought he was hipper than other people around," says Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who cast Yao opposite Verne (Mini-Me) Troyer in an ad for the firm's new notebook computers. Visa built its Super Bowl ad around Yao's brief English-speaking debut ("Can I write a check?" he asks...
...Olympics in Beijing. Yao should be reaching his basketball prime just as the world's attention is focused on him and his country. Yao doesn't really care. He just wants to endorse products he actually uses (he has an Apple laptop and says, "I've had Visa for four years") and appear in ads that make him look cool. Otherwise, he says, "I think it's all pretty boring. I'd much rather be playing basketball." --With reporting by Perry Bacon/Washington
DIED. GEORGE WATERS, 87, executive who turned the American Express card into the company's flagship product; of heart problems; in Fair Haven, N.J. Until 1961, when Waters was hired, credit cards were used mostly by restaurants, Visa and MasterCard did not exist, and the American Express card lagged behind one offered by the Diners Club. One of his first moves was to persuade American Airlines to accept the American Express card; other airlines and businesses followed quickly, and the card soon became a global brand...
...people who fled the country following the fall of Saigon in 1975 are known. Once reviled as traitors, Viet Kieu are now seen as resources, even patriots, for their access to foreign capital and Western business and technical expertise. The Hanoi government courts them with preferential tax rates, relaxed visa requirements, even low-interest loans. "It's the best of both worlds," says David Thai, 30, who returned in 1995 and now runs Viet Thai International, a coffee business in Ho Chi Minh City. "In business terms, it's pretty much a license to kill...