Reuters Business
FEATURE-Telecom companies lure Chinese in US back
to China
By Wei Gu
NEW YORK, April 28 (Reuters) - They are fighting for a piece of the largest cell phone
market in the world -- China -- and they're looking for their foot soldiers 15,000 miles (24,000
km) away, among Chinese speakers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Finland's Nokia Corp. (NYSE:NOK - news), the world's top cell phone
maker, Motorola Inc. (NYSE:MOT - news), the No. 2 manufacturer, and
China's largest telecom company, Huawei Technology, were offering some
20 positions from marketing to engineering at a recent job fair organized by
MIT's Chinese Student & Scholar Association, the first event of its kind at
the college aimed at the Chinese.
The prize: a market that adds 3.2 million users every month -- more than the
population of Kansas. China has about 150 million cell phone users among a
population of 1.3 billion.
The hiring for the Chinese market is in sharp contrast with thousands of job
cuts in telecom companies elsewhere in the world.
Nokia sent eight people to scout the MIT job fair.
"I'm overwhelmed by the number and quality of people." Frank Wilson, Nokia's Asia Pacific human resources director said, adding
that Nokia would pursue this kind of hiring in the future.
At arm's length, recruiters from Motorola, which competes head-to-head with Nokia in China, gathered resumes for about 10
openings in China.
Huawei, a fixed network, mobile communications and optical networks provider with about $3 billion in sales, was also seeking to
fill positions in the United States and China.
This talent search comes as China is deciding whether to use U.S. or European cell phone standards for next generation networks.
The choice between the U.S. standard Code Division Multiple Access network (CDMA) and the European Global System for
Mobile Communications (GSM) will help to decide the fortunes of global equipment vendors.
"We desperately want people who have CDMA knowledge," said James Li, a recruiter and senior information technology
manager with Motorola in Chicago, who also chairs Motorola's Asian Business Council. Motorola, which started with GSM then
added CDMA phones, is the sole completely foreign vendor among 19 firms China has licensed to produce handsets for CDMA
networks, developed by U.S. wireless technology firm Qualcomm Inc.(NasdaqNM:QCOM - news). Others are Chinese
companies or joint ventures.
China followed Europe's lead in the 1980s and 1990s and built up most of its massive mobile infrastructure using the GSM
standard, which is dominant in Europe and Asia.
Now, Nokia and Motorola, who each control about 30 percent market share in China, are competing for talent to help them
dominate that market.
"It's very difficult to hire local talent in China, as many companies are willing to pay higher," Alfred Chuang, chief executive
officer of application server software provider BEA Systems Inc. (NasdaqNM:BEAS - news), said at a recent Harvard
University conference about China's economic growth.
Industry insiders say it is unlikely foreign companies will pay expatriate packages or U.S. wages, especially with many facing
financial challenges. Wilson did not say how Nokia, for example, would pay people who are hired to work in China.
Foreign telecom companies look for people who are bilingual, with overseas education and working experience, which accelerates
the return of U.S.-trained Chinese to China. About 140,000, or 43 percent of the 320,000 Chinese students who studied abroad in
the past two decades have returned and the figure is growing 13 percent a year.
"There had never been a rate that people are moving back like China is experiencing now," BEA Systems' Chuang said.
The view of many returnees is that their careers can advance further in China, where they can tap into social networks and speak
their native language.
"Although I've been in the United States for 10 years, I am still not comfortable competing with native English speakers. But my
overseas experience may put me on a fast track to top jobs in China," said Qinhai Xia, a programmer and co-organizer of the MIT
job fair, who wants to be a business manager after returning to China.
While people wanting jobs on the business side seem generally eager to return, researchers and engineers are hesitant, citing
better opportunities in the United States, partly due to foreign companies' reluctance to take the most advanced technology to
China because of intellectual property concerns.
"Engineers want to work on the best projects, and the best projects for American companies would always be in the United
States," said James Qin, an engineer with Nortel Networks Ltd. (NYSE:NT - news).
Qin said he also thinks it would take the same amount of effort in China as in the United States to land a top engineering job
because Chinese companies are also looking for the best in their fields.
Huawei Technology, for example, says on its Web site that only senior level professionals "who have rich work experience in local
or overseas international companies" are welcome.
"Very few people can meet those standards," Qin said.
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Lol! i knew i would get you out from under the rocks with that one....ROTF! |
