dck
加入时间: 2004/04/02
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作者：dck 在 众议院 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Woman helps businesses sell their products in China
The average fee for companies launching a foreign initiative came to about $10,000
By Fred O. Williams
Updated: 03/12/07 7:09 AM
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Many Americans know at least one Chinese word, but Bonnie Girard thinks we’re getting it wrong.
The word is “guanxi,” usually translated as “relationships” — which everyone knows are the key to doing business in China.
Girard — for whom China has been both a home and an obsession for 20 years — says the literal translation is actually two words.
The second means “system.” The first means “closed.”
“I believe it’s one of the most mistranslated words between any two languages,” says the president of China Channel Ltd., a business consulting firm. “What they’re really saying is you need access to a closed system.”
The language lesson came over coffee on Delaware Avenue, at the office of the World Trade Center Buffalo Niagara. The regional trade group and Girard’s company recently formed their own business deal, under which China Channel will make extra efforts to help area companies profit in the People’s Republic. As part of the deal, Girard will be spending more time here — from her base in Virginia and offices in Beijing — with visits to Buffalo four times a year.
Holly Sinnot, director of the trade center, said the alliance gives local companies a set of eyes and ears in China. With a staff of 10 spread between Beijing and Shanghai, China Channel can give advice and assistance for obtaining government licenses, finding distributors and suppliers, or setting up operations as a “WOFE,” a wholly-owned foreign enterprise.
With expert help, “you’re less likely to get your hands burned,” Sinnot says. Consulting fees depend on the scope of the project, she says. Last year’s average fee for companies launching a foreign initiative came to about $10,000.
Despite the hurdles, numerous Western New York companies have succeeded in selling their wares in China. Some have set up factories there, as in the case of Rich Products, and many have found suppliers to supplement their own products. Increasingly smaller companies are able to link with foreign partners, Sinnot said.
Buffalo Batt & Felt in Depew used the trade center’s help to find Chinese suppliers of Christmas ornaments to support its sales of Buffalo Snow, the decorative fluff that the firm sells nationally.
“We saw things starting to come in from China,” general manager Robert Heilman said. Instead of trying to compete with imports, the company found Chinese partners to provide tree skirts and other material to sell alongside its locally made “snow.”
“Anyone who is involved in manufacturing in the U.S. has got to understand China,” Heilman said.
There’s no shortage of help available for companies looking to go abroad, from the U.S. Commerce Department to private consultants large and small.
As a consultant, it may be in Girard’s interest to emphasize the difficulty for an outsider to work the system — with or without relationships. Then again, she probably has a point when she says it would be foolhardy for a U.S. company to simply walk into a deal with Chinese partners without performing due diligence beforehand.
“Things are not always what they seem; people are not always who they purport to be,” she says.
In a country where the legal system is weak, it’s easy to lose one’s shirt to sharp practices. Safety lies in finding partners whose interests are truly aligned with yours. That requires knowing who your partners really are, and their motivations.
“If you have to go to court, you’ve already lost,” Girard says. She cites one client, a technology company from the West Coast, that hired her to check out its Chinese partner in a joint production deal. Eager to do the deal, the client had all but signed a contract and was probably expecting a rubber stamp.
But Girard checked around and uncovered links between the Chinese company and a shadowy arm of the military. The indications were strong that the “business partner” was a cutout and that the real goal was to duplicate the West Coast company’s technology.
“Our client was a sitting duck,” she says.
Girard first went to live in China after graduating from the University of North Carolina, trading Chapel Hill for the drab sea of conformity that was Beijing in 1987.
“Minders followed us everywhere, (and) there were bugs in our room,” she said. Even so, Girard was “hooked” on trying to understand the culture. When her year-long language study program wound down, she found a way to stay on by taking jobs at embassies, starting with Australia’s.
She stayed on through the summer of 1989, when the government harshly put down the Tiananmen Square protests and foreign visitors and companies scrambled for home. Companies “came filtering back in, quietly,” Girard says.
In 1996 one of them, the French telecom giant Alcatel, hired her to help set up a new telephone system around the country, as the vendor to the Chinese government. The work took her to China’s Western hinterlands and the Russian border. She dealt with local phone bureaus and came up with ways of getting things done that hadn’t been necessary before in the controlled economy.
After that “I began to see more and more companies from the U.S. and Europe come in and make a lot of mistakes, so I started China Channel in Beijing.”
Her husband Roland Evans, a British engineer working with oil exploration projects, joined as a partner in 1999.
Of the mistakes, the biggest was trying to buy one’s way into the system directly, she says. Forming relationships with partners and key government officials is fine over dinner; direct inducements like cash are likely to backfire.
“The Chinese respect strength, they respect people who will stand by their guns,” she says. Prospective partners often face an arduous negotiation process designed to test that strength.
Through it all, it helps for U.S. companies to remind themselves that they are in fact highly desired, as sources of growth-inducing capital as well as technology.
“It behooves companies to remember,” Girard says, “that the Chinese need you more than you need them.”
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作者：dck 在 众议院 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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