On December 19, Gordon Orr, a senior director of McKinsey's Shanghai branch, published a signed article in the McKinsey Quarterly, boldly predicting events that might astonish the world in China in 2009. These include large mergers and acquisitions on a scale ten or a hundred times larger than Lenovo's $1.35 billion purchase of IBM's PC business, and a reorganization to rebalance competition in China's telecommunications market.