Apple’s iPad computers “are becoming a little harder to find in mainland China,” USA Today reports. The newspaper said that the Chinese version of Amazon had stopped selling iPads because it is not an authorized reseller of the device. Meanwhile, Chinese officials are looking at a request to ban Apple from importing or exporting iPads as part of a trademark dispute between an LCD screen maker and Apple. Apple said it bought the iPad trademark to sell in China years ago. Monitor’s Torsten Stocker told the newspaper he did not think the trademark dispute was affecting Apple’s brand, but “constant disputes” could.

The appointment of Greg Foran to head Wal-Mart’s China business surprised some analysts because the executive, a veteran of Australian retailer Woolworths Ltd., is not a “China hand.” But Torsten Stocker, a leader of Monitor Group’s China consumer goods practice, told Just-style.com that Foran’s job was to improve the operational performance of Wal-Mart in the country.

The Chinese market is difficult to penetrate for Walmart. Even though the giant retailer has 350 stores in 140 cities, The Financial Times reports that it has not reached scale yet to compete effectively. Torsten  Stocker, a partner at Monitor and head of the firm’s Asia consumer goods practice, told the newspaper this was not a surprise. “China is a battlefield. You literally have almost everybody,” he said.

A pharmaceutical pricing model adopted by regulators in Anhui province and 17 other provinces in China has pressured drug makers to keep costs low, notes this report in the Hong Kong-based Asia Times Online.  Monitor’s George Baeder, an expert on the life sciences industry in China, told the publication that the implementation of the pricing process has reduced the quality of drugs in general because few bidders for drug contracts are disqualified on technical grounds, a trend that creates challenges for Western pharmaceutical companies.

Chinese regulators are limiting foreign television programs from prime time broadcast, The Wall Street Journal reports. This will disappoint some viewers, and potentially some merchants. Torsten Stocker, a partner with Monitor, told the newspaper that some Korean soap operas are so popular that their characters’ wardrobes inspire orders from Chinese clothing makers and retailers.

The Wall Street Journal reported that a private-equity fund backed by the French luxury brands company LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA has purchased a piece of Trendy International Group, a Chinese company that is part of a fast-growing apparel market. Torsten Stocker, a partner at Monitor and expert on the Chinese retail market, told the newspaper that unlike Western manufacturers that control their brand images, most Chinese fashion brands operate on a franchise model, and so these brands do not form as strong ties to Chinese consumers as Western brands do.

2012 may be the year newspapers like The New York Times figure out how to get a critical mass of readers to pay for the articles they read in digital form, argues Clay Shirky, an author, academic and a member of Monitor Talent. Shirky spoke about his observations on NPR’s "Talk of the Nation."

Apple recently canceled the launch of the latest iPhone model in its Chinese retail stores, but that doesn’t stop consumers from wanting to buy it—even though consumers say they don’t think it performs much better than the most recent model, and the voice-activated Siri feature in the iPhone 4S does not work in Chinese, China Daily reported. Monitor’s Huang Yu told the newspaper that a niche group of consumers want luxury products like the iPhone 4S as a status symbol. “The niche group becomes a large number of people in China, given the country’s large population,” he added.

Diana McLain Smith, the Chief Executive Partner at New Profit Inc., and a former Monitor partner, has published a new book, Elephant in the Room: How Relationships Make or Break the Success of Leaders and Organizations.

Because the Chinese government has tightened credit policies, small businesses are relying more on private moneylenders, media reports have noted. The problem has become notable in the city of Wenzhou, in the prosperous Zhejiang province, one of the first cities to develop a private sector economy in the wake of the country’s 1978 economic reforms. One of the big questions is how far the problems experienced in Wenzhou are indicative of a generalized funding crisis in China.