Marie So flips open her laptop on a roughly hewn wooden table and begins her presentation on the economics of yak cheese. Around the table are her three partners, US-educated graduates eager to do business on the mainland, and the cheese makers of Langdu, a village of yak herders in Yunnan province .
Tonight the young investors will sleep in unheated log cabins and cross a river to use a wooden outhouse.
But first, there's business to do.
The cheese-makers are ethnic Tibetans taking their first baby steps in China's brash market economy. Brows furrowed, they follow the flow charts and pricing data, and listen to the pitch from Ms So, originally from Hong Kong. 'If you've got a good product, you will have a market. But you've got to ensure good sanitation,' she tells them.
Finally the on-screen graphics fade into photos of the cheese-makers posing outside their modest factory. They erupt into cheers and laughter, and rise to toast their new partners as the meeting breaks up.
While its rapid industrialisation gets the headlines, mainlanders living in remote rural areas have seen fewer benefits.
Among the poorest are ethnic minorities in the west, such as the Tibetans in Langdu, where most of the 107 households get by on less than US$1 a day.