NYCU Media together with Euromonitor International and KPMG just published its newest ranking of the TOP 500 companies of the Asia Pacific region. At Oct. 24th 2017 the Best-of-the-Best will be honored in an Award Ceremony & Gala Dinner in Kuala Lumpur/ Malaysia . Among the international jury for more than a decade is Prof.Dr.Bernd Hallier.

Measured by sales (US $ mn) the leading company is AEON/Daiei (Japan) with 29.870 mn and 688 outlets in front of 7-Eleven (Japan) with 27.206 mn (19.572), Thomas Dux/Woolworth (Australia) 25.022 mn (981), Westfarmers/Coles (Australia) 24.714 mn (783), Family Mart (Japan) 17.287 mn (18.606), China Resources Holding(China) 15.530 mn (906), Sun Art Retail (China) 14.631 mn (432), Gome Electrical (China) 14.101 mn (1.195), Suning Commerce (China) 13.907 mn (1.500) and Lawson (Japan) 13.780 mn (12.837).
 

In Europe the most famous name connected with the Silk Road is the Venetian merchant Marco Polo (1254 - 1324). But Dr.Francis Wood from the British Museum in London does question if Marco Polo had ever been in China; she believes that he traveled only up to Constantinople and everything else is fiction! For sure his reports became only well-known in 1558 - 234 years after his death.

In his notes dictated to Rusticello from Pisa with whom he shared for 10 months a prison cell in Genoa he neither mentioned the Great Wall or the Chinese pottery nor the crippled feet of the Chinese women at that time. Therefore the thesis is that he got his China information from people from Far East for whom the Wall, the pottery, the feet were so common that it was not worth to be mentioned. Scientific fact is too that over the centuries the Marco Polo story increased by each new edition. More about the Silk Road at AEUC (Link).
 

There is no other city in the world which over thousands of years is an example for change/urban revitalization like Byzanz (Greek Empire), Konstantinopel (Roman Empire), Stanbul (Osman Empire) and today called Istanbul - being the bridge between Orient and Okzident as like as it was already in the times of the historical SILK ROAD .

The biggest Shopping Centers in Istanbul are according to Dr.Cebrayil Valiyev the Forum Istanbul (176.400/2009), Mall of Istanbul (135.000/2011), Istanbul Javahir (110.000/2005), Torium (90.000/2010), MetroCity (51.000/2003), Olivium (35.000/2000), Akmerkez (34.000/1993) and Airport Outlet (32.000/2008). For Galleria (77.000/1988) and Atirus (56.000/2005) data reflect the total area of the facility.
 

According to CBRE the cities of China are the champions completing shopping malls. Among the Top 20 China is listed with 10 cities with the following square-meters completed in 2016:

Among these key-players are listed Mexico City with 684.540, Moscow with 468.200, Melbourne with 408.645, Brisbane with 379.463, Kuala Lumpur with 337.595, and Guadalajara with 336.921 square-meters.
 

The European Retail Academy welcomes the opening of the Expo Astana with the topic of Future Energy! By this contribution of Kazakhstan devoting its focus to CO2-emissions and the Global Climate Change it demonstrates its leadership for a better Global House of Harmony.

The European Retail Academy started its Global Green University (Link) after a student trip from Yekaterinburg/Russia to Kazakhstan's Astana Economic Forum in 2013. The students of the World Economic Youth Forum demanded in an official declaration - drafted together with Prof.Dr.M.Fedorov and Prof.Dr.B.Hallier - from politics more attention to green issues. In 2013 the first Peace Nobel Laureate to sign also that declaration was Prof.Dr. Rae Kwon Chung from Korea. Prof.Hallier will promote in 2017 those ideas by a speech at the Astana Economic Forum about a necessary new equilibrium for economics - connected with ecology and ethics: even giving the ECOLOGY the dominant role in that triangle (Presentation).