Last week, we reflected back on the successful LocWorld, Shenzhen event which discussed the prospect of artificial intelligence being more and more involved in the future of business. The second half of the panel continued to discuss the future and how China and Chinese businesses are set to play a greater role in global business in years to come.
Multinational Companies Focus on the Perfect User Experience.
Shunee Yee, Founder and CEO of CSOFT International, led the talks stating that, “more and more Chinese companies are trying to shift their business models to sell their products abroad. Many Shenzhen companies started as cheap manufacturers and some of them have become leading brands in global businesses.”
As China’s leading language service provider, CSOFT has helped 4 out of the top 5 global Chinese businesses – Lenovo, Huawei, Alibaba, and Xiaomi, to “go global”. When partnering with these companies, CSOFT uses its cultural and linguistic expertise to overcome the barriers and pre-conceptions that often meet Chinese brands in international markets. By analyzing local markets and implementing a strong, country specific communication strategy, CSOFT is able to assist companies in rebuilding the “Made in China” perception.
According to a report released by Kantar Millward Brown and Google, only 8% of foreign consumers prefer to buy Chinese branded products. That is why it is important to set industry standards and build quality products to achieve success and profits in global market.
Based on the data from GALA, the total value of the global language market in 2016 is around 40 billion USD, and will increase to 45 billion USD by 2020. Behind the increasing market value is an increasing demand for communication across cultures and countries. It’s becoming more and more important for Multi-National Enterprises to follow the latest trends in globalization and localization.
Shenzhen companies, such as Huawei, are realizing the importance of localization strategies to their overseas expansion. However, a lot of companies just sell their products and ignore the crucial needs for cultural adaptation. What Huawei focuses on is to help foreign customers in understanding the products and bringing them the “ultimate user experience.”
As a leader for Shenzhen companies going global, Huawei is serving 30% of the global population and has business in more than 170 countries and regions. Outstanding language services played a critical role in Huawei’s successful globalization efforts. Director of Huawei’s translation center, Shengquan Chen, pointed out that “many companies will face problems from translations and, to fully solve these issues, they need to understand the local society, respect regulations, and contribute to the local society”.
VP of Halliburton China, David Zeng, also said, “the difficulty is the communication between people instead of transnational technology.” If companies want to understand the connotations of the local cultures, translation and localization are still required. Due to the inappropriate integration of services, many international businesses may be charged a higher price.
“Made in China 2025” Requires “Shenzhen Quality”
The panel consisted of David Zeng, Zhong Weihe, and Shunee Yee
According to the former report from MOFCOM and CCG, from Jan to Nov 2016, China ‘s ODI reached 161 billion USD across 7500 companies in 163 countries or regions, reaching around 55.3% year-on-year growth.
In terms of the strategy of “going out”, companies from Shenzhen are the top in China. In the era of promoting “Shenzhen quality”, there are many companies such as Huawei, Tencent, Mindray, and Kuang-chi that have become top brands around the world. Companies from Shenzhen have realized importance of localization during the process of going global, and believe they must solve the quality issues and marketing before expanding to markets overseas.
CSOFT opened its new branch in Shenzhen in 2013 and businesses from Shenzhen have experienced rapid growth since then. In 2003, when CSOFT was founded in Beijing, it started to assist businesses in expanding around the world and now CSOFT has more than 500 employees in 15 different countries and regions. CSOFT now can provide services and localization solutions in more than 100 different languages and has clients all over the world becoming one of the world’s largest languages service providers.
In the beginning, CSOFT provided services to Fortune 500 enterprises world-wide such as IBM and Microsoft, but has since turned its focus back to Chinese businesses in recent years. In 2016, CSOFT’s Founder and CEO Shunee Yee, researched and published the first report on Globalization Maturity of Chinese Companies—“The Globalization Shenzhen 100 Report“. The report analyzed and ranked the top companies in Shenzhen in terms of their globalization maturity. Shunee Yee pointed out that “highly efficient globalization is the way Shenzhen companies must experience true global success.”
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