To: Yongzhi Yang who wrote (935 ) 2/24/1999 11:29:00 PM From: ztect Read Replies (2) | Respond to
Some interesting info on which you maybe able to comment......headcount.com Q: China and India are similar economies in the sense that both of them feature vast middle classes, with a predominant rural population and a limited but rapidly exploding IT savvy group. Ava answers: Businesses in China are constrained in their technology leap because of lack of experienced programmers. System integrators in China are dominated by returning professionals (from US) and there are too few to go around to cover the upgrades for all of China's financial, manufacturing and communications industries. In order to address this conspicuous shortage, the Economic Ministry announced last week it welcomed US technology companies to set up joint ventures in China. On the second part of your question, perhaps you are too modest, the respective countries should be reversed: China should learn from India. Where Indian companies were prescient enough to take on subcontracted SI and application development work from America as as far back as 1996 (all the while building up their learning curves, growth curves to a scale to make it an exportable commodity). So China watches quietly while India's largest government-owned System Integrator group registered earlier this summer an impending IPO in US markets. Q: With low telephone and low credit card penetration in China is e-commerce going to be the way forward and if so when will China be ready to support it? Ava answers: Good question. From a business-to-business perspective, Web based commerce offers an ideal order-taking solution; it doesn't take an MBA to figure out it is cost-effective business practice for both merchants and buyers. As for payments facilitated on the Web, it's up to micropayment companies and payment transporter software companies to influence banking regulators in favor of their agenda, i.e. credit cards, standardized clearing mechanisms. Our clients see Shanghai opening up by end of this year. If you are looking for impressive "supporting" statistics to check against your "readiness" criteria, suggest you look at Taiwan. Q: Should I hold back on marketing expansion during Asia's financial crisis? Ava answers: If you're a VIV (very important vendor), no, you shouldn't revise your sales objectives for China. It will cost you more to loose market share in China than to pause now, only to restart the engine in 6 months. The software firms I advise that have expanded in or continued to increase presence in China have leveraged the currency crunch to their advantage in reaching marketing agreements with channel partners (to yield better minimum, support term, localization feature, marketing budget, etc). Ava Chien is President of Chien & Co., a technology marketing firm with special expertise in Asia market development. After a banking career on Wall Street, Ava moved to Taiwan where she built marketing strategies for multinational corporations in Greater China. In New York, she was Director of Marketing & Sales at Novax Group and Magna Software. She is graduated from Columbia University and Dartmouth College.
