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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (3135)	5/1/2004 5:07:48 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6370

What? Have we become monolingual and insular? Singapore is not the centre of the universe and mainland Chinese do not need us as much as we may think they do By QUAK HIANG WHAI A LOCAL media report this week addressed the question of head honchos of listed mainland companies facing hiccups in their dealings with analysts and fund managers here. Most notably, the report quoted the financial controller of a mainland company as saying that about half of the analysts and fund managers in Singapore don't understand Chinese well. It also quoted a local research head agreeing that language is an issue since very few analysts are proficient in Chinese, especially business Mandarin. Indeed, from the perspective of some of the younger Singapore executives I have met, there seems to be this hugely misplaced perception that our overall English proficiency is better than that of many of the people around us. Mind you, there are only 4 million people here. There are a few contentious issues here. But first and foremost, have we become too monolingual, if not insular? Many well-educated executives here seem to think Singapore is the centre of the universe and that everyone has to speak our language. But do the mainland Chinese - a staggering 1.3 billion of them, with annual economic growth rates near double digits - need us more than we need them? Have we become so arrogant as to assume that Singapore is the ideal destination for mainland Chinese businessmen and executives, or for that matter, other Asian investors? First, we aren't exactly the top destination. Just as many of the top bankers and executives in the US are never too keen on taking up posts here - we usually end up with their second or third best - many Chinese and Indian talents aren't exactly excited about taking up top jobs or living here either. (Incidentally, in case you haven't noticed, many of our companies put retired or ousted vice-chairmen on their boards, and never the Jack Welchs or the Sandy Weills). In 2000, about 39,000 people - a high proportion of them professionals - left China to work overseas. A Chinese Ministry of Public Security report listed Singapore as one of their top destinations. But the Beijing report said China's high-tech professionals had made Australia their No 1 destination. A recent Australian government report said Chinese nationals accounted for most of the 155,000 foreign high-tech professionals who had migrated there over the past five years. Other top destinations are Hong Kong and India - yes, India. Second, if you still think mainland Chinese don't speak good English, you probably haven't been around much. Interestingly, during my six-year stint in Hong Kong, many of the Hong Kong bankers and brokers were still dealing with traditional financial products such as mortgages and credit cards while the top notch derivatives traders, economists and financial engineers were actually US-trained mainland Chinese armed with post-graduate degrees from the likes of Harvard and Yale, and an American accent thrown in. When Hong Kong developers jumped on to the dotcom bandwagon in 1999, many of them hired US-trained mainlanders to jumpstart their portal businesses. business-times.asia1.com.sg