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School of Management Royal Holloway, University of London Multinational Retailers in the Asia Pacific Dr Jos Gamble  This report was prepared by: Jos Gamble at the School of Management, Royal Holloway 27 April 2007 Address for correspondence: Dr Jos Gamble School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX United Kingdom Tel.?+44(0)1784 414094 Fax +44(0)1784 4276100 j.gamble@rhul.ac.uk  Acknowledgments This research was funded by the ESRC/AHRC under its Cultures of Consumption programme award number RES-143-25-0028 for the project ‘Multinational Retailers in the Asia Pacific’, from 1st April 2003 to 30th April 2007. I would also like to thank earlier support from a British Council China Studies Grant, the Daiwa Foundation, the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, and Royal Holloway for ‘pump-priming’ that was essential to the success of this project. I would like to express gratitude to all those companies and individuals who gave their time so generously. Many thanks also to Qihai Huang, for being such as conscientious, hardworking and resourceful Research Assistant. I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Melissa Schroder in the preparation of this report.  Preface This report has been prepared for both practitioners and academics. In undertaking this task, there is the risk that neither group is fully satisfied. While academics would like to see far more engagement with academic debates, practitioners are inevitably more concerned to understand the implications for business in China. In terms of style, the approach has been to use plain English with as little academic jargon as possible. At the same time, it is hoped that academic readers will find the contents thought provoking and sufficiently interesting to be encouraged to read the more conventional academic papers that are referred to in the text. The con