Strategic intelligence & ecosystem building

What do you need to understand?

The global economy is getting harder to read. Business leaders are making bigger decisions with less certainty, and the questions cut across more than one discipline and more than one source.

I work with executives and policymakers in Europe and Asia on strategic intelligence and executive peer exchange. I help them get the right inputs for situational assessments, strategy and policy, benchmarking and validation, so they can underwrite their own reading of a situation and the decisions that follow. The input can come from a dataset, a researcher, a specialist, or another executive who has faced the same question.

AI now makes intelligence cheap and abundant. The scarce part is judgement. Which sources to trust, and what to act on.

I have spent more than 25 years growing intelligence and membership businesses and advising institutional clients, including 17 years in China. I am based in Vienna and work independently, across a portfolio of concurrent engagements in Europe, Asia and the US.

Strategic Intelligence

Three pillars of insight.

01 Subscription

Content, data and analysis

Structured, syndicated insight on a steady cadence: data, written analysis, video and AI tools built on proprietary research, delivered by subscription and able to plug into an organisation's own workflows. For the executive or policymaker, it is insight on demand: a fast, sharp take on the issue at hand, in whatever format the moment calls for. The bento box of insight.

02 Briefings

Expert briefings

Specialist briefings, designed to open up dialogue among internal stakeholders or to anchor event programmes for external audiences. A briefing can be the precursor to a management meeting, a strategy dialogue or a policy exchange. With the right specialists on speed dial, an organisation can put an independent expert who knows the terrain inside out in front of its board, its leadership team or its clients, so the meeting that follows starts from a shared picture instead of from scratch.

03 Membership

Peer exchange

Closed-door peer groups under Chatham House Rule, funded by members or hosted by a sponsor. A group can be role-based, or cross-functional and built around a theme, and it can draw on proprietary analysis and expert briefings. Senior professionals, business leaders and policymakers already have more information than they can use, and the experience to place it in context. What a structured, genuinely interactive exchange of peers adds is candour, the scarce resource in an age of information overload: peers share what they actually did, not what they would advise, and test a decision before it is made.

Focus

What moves competitiveness up or down.

Most mandates I see come back to three forces: how well an organisation puts AI to work today, how China is reshaping global markets, and who controls the minerals and supply chains industry depends on. All three are transversal enterprise topics, and I serve them, agenda-free, with my core partners and best-in-class insight providers from my network.

China, growth and risk

For most European companies, China is no longer a market to enter but a force to manage: a competitor arriving in your home markets, a supplier that is hard to replace, a rival for customers in third markets, and increasingly the source of technology others adopt. Seventeen years in China taught me that you have to be close to change to read it. I help leadership teams get that read: aligning headquarters and regional views, sizing Chinese competition, and testing decisions with peers who have faced the same question. CGSP Intelligence is my core partner on China’s global footprint, and I draw on a trusted ecosystem of specialists for the rest.

Questions such as

Where is China moving in our markets?
How exposed are we, and what are we missing?
What happens next, and how should we respond?
Do headquarters and the region see the same China?

AI acceleration & business transformation

What will separate the winners of the current AI wave is adoption and deployment at scale. That goes beyond which processes change and who owns them. It means imagining what your organisation looks like in 5 or 10 years and working backwards to stay a step ahead. I support confidential, closed-door communities where executives, practitioners and technology partners benchmark and exchange experience.

Questions such as

What does our organisation look like in 5 to 10 years?
Where is AI already changing how we compete?
Do we buy, build or partner?

Critical minerals & industrial supply chains

China sits at the centre of the world’s mineral processing and industrial supply chains. Where minerals come from, who controls the assets, how projects are financed and where processing is concentrated now shape corporate strategy and public policy. I help leaders read China’s role in these supply chains and what it means for industrial competitiveness. CGSP Intelligence tracks China’s mining and minerals footprint across the Global South, and I work with MiningTerminal, a leading-edge mining data start-up, on project intelligence, bringing these perspectives into assessments, executive briefings and commercial discussions.

Questions such as

Where are the critical dependencies in our supply chains?
How is China’s role in mining and processing changing?
Which projects, companies and investments could reshape supply?
What does this mean for our business over the next five to ten years?

Portfolio

Current engagements.

Launching January 2027

Locally rooted reporting, proprietary data and expert analysis on China’s engagement across Africa, Asia and the wider developing world.

A new intelligence service from The China Global South Project, built for ministries, development agencies and multilateral institutions, and for the companies operating alongside them: an independent, fact-based read on China’s engagement across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

My role: Director of Institutional Clients

Explore CGSP Intelligence One-pager (PDF) cgspintelligence.com

How I work

Inside the company, and outside it.

I work as comfortably on corporate structures, go-to-market, talent and technology as on macro, geopolitics and longer-term trends.

Over the years I have run hundreds of rooms where these issues met, and where executives made sense of them behind closed doors. I wrote down what I learned in You’re only as good as your last session.

Whether it is a briefing, a peer group or a partner ecosystem, the craft is the same, and I learned it in boardrooms in China, Singapore and Europe. Get the right quorum and the right agenda. Make the payback on executive time work. Keep the standard high. Repeat it often enough that trust compounds and the conversations start to shape decisions.

Track Record

25 years in international business development and strategic intelligence.

1999–2007

I started out in new media production and software in Amsterdam. In 2003 I moved to Shanghai to build the commercial side of the city's English-language daily newspaper, growing its advertising revenue tenfold.

2007–2009

The Economist Group hired me in Beijing to head sales for what is now Economist Enterprise, covering off-the-shelf data and publications, custom research and the Economist Corporate Network membership service. Executive communities and strategic intelligence have been my mainstay ever since.

2010–2020

As General Manager and Forum Director for IMA Asia, I built an executive forum and macro insights business in China from the ground up. It began with the China CEO Forum, for heads of MNC operations in China who report to the regional CEO, head of international or global CEO, and grew to include forums for China heads of finance, business units, strategy and marketing. I relocated to Europe in 2020 and left IMA China with a great team in place and a healthy, growing seven-figure operation.

2021–Present

I founded Propeller Strategies KG in Vienna, through which I work with clients and platforms across Europe, Asia and the US on a portfolio of concurrent engagements. With Asia Growth Partners and MING Labs, I originated innovation advisory work for European industrial companies and built a cross-border innovation community of 350+ practitioners through 40+ expert briefings. Clients and partners have included IMD Business School, Start2 Group and August Leadership.

2025–2026

I delivered an 18-month consultancy engagement with The Conference Board, a global, non-profit think tank and business membership organisation. Across three mandates, I provided strategic and commercial support to the growth of its China Center; contributed operationally to the launch of its key account strategy across Europe and Asia; and took an interim sales leadership role within the Economy, Strategy and Finance Center in Brussels.

2026–Present

I serve as Director of Institutional Clients at CGSP Intelligence, part of The China Global South Project (CGSP), in a fractional role. CGSP is an award-winning, independent, non-partisan intelligence platform covering China's engagement across Africa, Asia and the wider developing world. My mandate is to drive institutional growth, connecting practitioners in government, business, academia and the non-profit sector with fact-based, agenda-free intelligence.

Former clients and colleagues

“We were lucky to have James Loudon join the IMA Asia team in China in 2010. Over the next nine years he did a fantastic job in building our forums, which required networking with the CEOs of leading MNCs in China, developing our issues management agenda, hiring and developing team members, and delivering great sessions. James excels at issues analysis and management, which ensured our China forums developed a strong following.
When COVID-19 hit James and his family were stuck in Europe and eventually we agreed it made sense to put the kids in school there. We are still delighted to connect with James on China and Asia issues and look forward to catching up in Europe.”

Richard MartinManaging Director, IMA Asia

“James’s real strength is convening. He builds rooms that senior people keep coming back to, and he does it by making someone else the point of the session rather than himself. That takes a rare kind of confidence. He is also a genuinely good reader of a situation. He works out what people are actually reaching for, and hands you something usable before the next conversation rather than a set of notes.
The doors follow from that. He got us into a global industrial group at senior level and kept the relationship warm across regions and functions for years. Anyone can make an introduction. Very few keep it alive.”

Sebastian MuellerFounding Partner, AI Transformation and Ventures

“I recommend James to anyone looking for a well connected China hand who puts a lot of energy into finding ways to bring value to his clients. When I met James I was in the midst of a strategy project prioritizing China’s regional IT opportunities. James’ willingness and ability to understand the nuances of the project and then work to line up solutions made all the difference between an average outcome and the excellent outcome we achieved.”

Nathan MidlerEntrepreneur, former Head of Strategy, IBM

Essays

What intelligence is worth, and when a meeting is worth your time.

01 Framework

The unit economics of information

Why some intelligence costs the price of a subscription and some the price of a consulting project, and what AI is doing to everything in between. A way to judge what your organisation should actually pay for.

Read · 6 min

02 Practice

You’re only as good as your last session

What sixty to eighty executive meetings a year in Shanghai taught me about making senior time pay back. Slide 49, the joker card, and why silence is not the enemy.

Read · 8 min

What's next

Start with the problem statement.

Scenario planning. A growth market or business development initiative. A risk or industrial policy question. A strategy project that needs an outside read. Or something else specific to your mandate.

I work across three worlds: government ministries and multilateral institutions; banks, corporations and multinationals; and advisory firms, NGOs, think tanks and universities. If that's you, drop me a line via the form below. I read every one myself, and we can start a conversation by email.