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Chinese companies ‘going global’ should learn from Japan’s mistakes, academic says
- A marketing analyst has said Chinese firms taking their business overseas can learn from their Japanese counterparts – in how not to do it
As more Chinese companies expand their overseas business – staying out of harm’s way as trade frictions with the West intensify – they can learn a lesson from their Japanese predecessors who failed in their own attempts at globalisation, a prominent academic said.
“China and Japan are very different. But I think the Chinese can learn a lot from Japan’s mistakes,” said Dominique Turpin, professor of marketing at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai.
If you want to globalise, you need to trust the locals
These trade barriers are meant to push Chinese companies to invest, he said, creating rather than destroying jobs in the bloc.
“It took something like 15 years for the Japanese to be forced to produce cars in Europe. When Nissan created a lot of jobs after they started producing in Europe, this kind of political argument went away to some extent,” Turpin said.
“I think it’s a kind of natural step that things are going to go faster this time. The leading Chinese company has already anticipated that move.”
Turpin placed the blame for a lack of continued global success for Japanese firms on a sense of complacency.
“If you want to globalise, you need to trust the locals,” he said, adding that few Japanese firms would hire foreigners in their top management for their overseas businesses.
“If you believe that your culture is superior, you will never become a global company,” Turpin said. “A global company to me is a company where you don’t care about the colour of [people’s] passports any more.”
“Management is the art of balancing two forces. If you trust the locals too much, you have a problem. If you control them too much, you have another problem.”
“The Chinese are super smart people, they are very pragmatic. It’s the same strategy that Mao Zedong used to conquer China,” Turpin said, referring to Mao’s revolutionary strategy of “surrounding the cities from the countryside”.
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