Firms can profit from serving foreigners as expat arrivals rise

"Even if we are supposed to write for expats, I had no idea of the difficulties that foreigners go through on a daily basis," a Chinese colleague of mine recently confessed to me after I published an article about two startups that offered virtual personal assistants for expats in China.

The online concierge companies I interviewed were helping foreigners deal with simple day-to-day problems like setting up an Alipay account, shopping online or ordering food.

Despite being an extremely simple concept, it had never occurred to her that there could be companies just focusing on making life easier for expats.