As the country merges into the world economy, best practice in China will become best practice globally, products developed in China will become global products, and industrial processes developed in China will become global processes.
Jimmy Hexter and Jonathan R. Woetzel
November 2007
How do your operations in China stack up, measure by operating measure, against what your company is doing in Europe, Japan, and the United States? This may be a more critical question than you realize: within a decade, if your organization in China isn’t a star in your company’s performance firmament, you may be in trouble—globally.
This question is also a very complex one to answer. Thousands of multinational companies of all sizes, including more than 460 Fortune 500 companies, now operate in China, and many are doing just fine. The American Chamber of Commerce in China conducts an annual business climate survey, and in its most recent one (which took place in 2006) 64 percent of the member companies reported that business in China was profitable or very profitable. One out of three said that their operations in China had higher margins than their worldwide organizations did, and another third reported margins on par with the global average.
But the conditions for success in China have been changing. Many multinational companies are expanding across the country to ever-smaller cities and towns, establishing positions to serve fast-growing segments of the Chinese middle class and small- and medium-sized businesses. In the process, they frequently incur greater sales, marketing, and distribution costs and take on new organizational challenges as they try to understand—and meet—the needs of customers in such markets. Moreover, they're encountering stiff competition from regional and national domestic Chinese rivals, which frequently know these customers better, have long-established business relationships in local markets, and compete relentlessly on price in places where consumers typically have much less money to spend than those in the big cities.
What’s worse, today’s sunny numbers mask underlying performance shortfalls. Because manufacturing-labor costs in China are a fifth of their levels in Europe and the United States, for instance, many multinationals have been running plants in China less efficiently than at home, and are still coming out way ahead. A recent McKinsey study of 30 multinational-owned factories in China found that waste reduced profits by 20 to 40 percent. Similarly, though several multinational retailers that source goods in China save as much as 20 percent compared with costs elsewhere, we’ve studied many of the goods they buy and found that they could realize far greater savings—often double what they achieve today—if they managed procurement processes as rigorously as they do in more established markets.
Managers don’t underperform in China intentionally. Waste is endemic to manufacturing plants there partly because some multinationals have inherited, through partnerships or acquisitions, legacy processes, employee mind-sets, and manufacturing approaches. A chaotic environment, changing regulation, and a red-hot talent market all do not help either. Waste in production plants, inefficient distribution networks, underleveraged procurement processes, and lackluster market research are hard to change, and if margins are good and business is growing, managers focus on growth, not operational improvements. But “good-enough” execution isn’t sufficient any more as businesses expand in China and competition stiffens. Companies such as Danfoss, GE, KFC, Johnson & Johnson, and Nokia are showing that execution counts in China. They took a different approach, with a far greater emphasis on high performance standards and operating rigor, and are beating domestic and global competitors in China’s smaller cities. In essence, these high-performing companies took best practices from operations elsewhere and adapted them—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot—to the realities of China.
This is the gold standard for how multinationals will raise the bar for execution in China over the next decade.
First came emerging market strategies
Fifteen years ago, multinational companies won in China by developing strategies to create privileged or first-mover access within highly focused markets. They secured government permission to enter, partnered with Chinese companies, and sold existing brands—from cars to cosmetics, hearing aids to handbags, skis to scarves—at premium prices to affluent buyers and large companies in China’s four or five largest cities. One European automaker, for example, moved quickly during the 1980s to secure preferential treatment for sales in Shanghai: the right location, the right government relationships, the right joint ventures. It then shut out other global OEMs from this market for nearly a decade. Industrial companies lined up in Beijing to sell their existing catalogs, with little adaptation to local circumstances. Simply showing up in China was a strategy that paid dividends.
Making the right strategic choices was critical; execution was another matter. Superb operating performance on the level that multinationals expect of their managers in competitive developed markets has been hard to achieve—even to define. Reliable data on markets and customers are rare, so it is difficult for managers to make decisions with as much clarity and confidence as they would in Europe or the United States. Managers in developed markets have access to a wealth of information, from point-of-sale data to reports on segments, products, and markets from third-party research firms. Not so in China. The managers of multinational companies thus found that they couldn’t replicate the marketing and product-development processes they had honed in developed markets, using information obtained there.
Similarly, multinational companies in China have had to work within logistics and distribution structures dating back to the days of the planned economy. What’s more, building a reliable base of high-quality suppliers has been a constant challenge. Even recently, some multinational companies have suffered high-profile setbacks because of problems with Chinese suppliers.1 In response to the seemingly unique situations encountered in China, multinational managers often created made-to-order processes and systems.
Many multinationals, for instance, designed custom HR systems and management-development processes, separate from their global systems, for organizations in China. A number of companies coped with the variability of manufacturing there by adding more people and machines—a solution they would never have adopted at plants in Brazil or Germany. Others dealt with unreliable suppliers by double- and triple-sourcing components and carrying more inventory.
As these examples suggest, the China-specific practices companies have created might be judged subpar elsewhere. But operations in China reflect market entry strategies and a high-growth environment that gave companies a lot of breathing room: competition held at bay, influential partners, pricing power, and affluent buyers hungry for global brands. Such systems, processes, and functions got the job done and were often good enough to accept.
Say goodbye to that era. Today China is open for business, and competition from both multinationals and local companies is increasing. Strategies based on creating and sustaining privileged access look more and more outdated. Joint-venture partners and acquisition targets are available to the highest (or at least most suitable) bidder. Business licenses are readily available. Particularly since joining the World Trade Organization, in December 2001, China has changed many of its rules and procedures governing business. It is beginning to resemble the rest of the world.
In other words, China has turned a corner, from an emerging market, where local context drives most strategic and operating decisions, to a maturing one, with world-class execution a cornerstone for success. As multinationals expand beyond the big cities and Chinese companies become more competitive, executives will need to ensure that their organizations develop, produce, sell, market, and distribute goods to customers as effectively and efficiently as possible.
