BEIJING, May 15 — Toyota plans to invest 1.5 billion yuan to boost production capacity at a facility in northern China by 50 percent to 150,000 vehicles a year. The expansion at the plant in Tianjin Municipality is due to be completed by the end of 2009.
The move would boost annual capacity of FAW Toyota, its venture with China’s FAW Group, to 470,000 units, and Toyota’s overall capacity in China to roughly 690,000 units.
Annual reports from several Chinese banks over the weekend reveal sky-high salaries for the senior management boards in China’s banking sector. China Minsheng Banking Corporation stands out with the highest paycheck.
Dong WenBiao, the president of China Minsheng Bank, tops the income chart. His annual pre-tax salary reached over 17.5 million yuan last year.
China Merchants Bank is also being generous to senior executives. In 2007, it doled out 53 million yuan to 26 board members and executives, and its CEO, Guan MaWei, earned nearly 10-million yuan pre-tax.
The Industrial bank paid out nearly 16-million yuan to 15 board members and executives. And its president, Gao JianPing, earned nearly 3 million yuan.
China had 1.54 million nurses as ofthe end of last year, up 240,000 from 2005, a senior health official said in Beijing on Monday.
Ma Xiaowei, vice health minister, told a tele-conference that last year alone, 120,000 more nurses joined the workforce, the biggest increase ever.
He said nurses accounted for 34 percent of China’s medical workers.
The quality of the nursing workforce was also being lifted, with 57.5 percent of those at 696 major hospitals nationwide having received junior college education or above, Ma quoted a survey as saying.
However, the survey also found nurses faced many problems including a heavy workload and lack of protection of their rights, he said.
In the surveyed hospitals, one nurse often cared for 10-14 patients and some cared for more than 30 patients, he said.
“The shortage of nurses has increased their workload and led tobelow-standard service for patients,” he said.
Ma said a new regulation on nurses that took effect on Monday would better protect their rights as to salary and benefits.
CHINESE companies’ foreign investments jumped more than fourfold in the first quarter as the government encouraged spending overseas to help cut a surging trade gap.
Foreign direct investments rose to US$19.3 billion in the period, Vice Minister of Commerce Chen Jian said at an investment forum in Beijing yesterday. That compares to US$18.7 billion for the whole of 2007.
China has pledged to help companies invest overseas as it seeks to curb a trade surplus that threatens to overheat the economy, Bloomberg News said. Inflation has already hit an 11-year high, partly because of a flood of cash from Chinese exports.
The government is to talk to other countries about lowering barriers for Chinese companies to invest abroad.
South China’s Guangdong province is the latest area in the nation to unveil plans to raise wages, state media said Wednesday, a move economists worry runs counter to efforts to rein in inflation.
Guangdong provincial labour authorities said in a 2008 plan that they aimed to establish a regular salary increase system and raise wages of all employees in the region by 12 percent or more this year, the China Youth Daily reported.
Other areas in China have announced similar polices, including the financial hub of Shanghai, where a salary rise guideline for this year has called on companies to lift employee wages by five to 16 percent.
This is meant to help households, especially low-income families, cope with the country’s surging inflation, which has fuelled government fears of potential social unrest.
China’s consumer price index rose 8.0 percent in the first quarter of the year. In February, it climbed to 8.7 percent, the highest in nearly 12 years, before easing slightly to 8.3 percent in March.
But analysts have voiced concern that salary hikes risk exacerbating the inflation problem that they are supposed to alleviate.
“Salary rises are certainly contributing to inflation,” said Chen Xingdong, an economist with BNP Paribas in Beijing.
If companies are told to pay higher wages, they may have to raise their prices to stay out of the red, the economists argued, warning this could be the beginning of a vicious cycle.
“The problem will get worse if salaries and price rises take turns,” said Ma Qing, a Beijing-based analyst with the think tank CEB Monitor Group.
They argued that it could also add an extra burden on companies that are already under big pressure of soaring upstream raw material prices and might even put them out of business.
“If the requirement goes beyond what companies can afford and therefore forces them to cut jobs or stop production, then the losses may be bigger than the gains,” said Shen Minggao with Citigroup.
The Chinese government has signalled growing concern about the ways in which rising prices might adversely affect the poorest in society.
Since January, it has resorted to freezing price hikes on key consumer items like grain, edible oil, meat, milk and liquefied petroleum gas in order to keep them affordable for most families.
Wage rises may be meant to do the same, but economists warned they could actually lead to more social tensions by widening income disparities.
This is because wage rises by decree are likely to benefit mainly government employees, while blue-collar workers in private companies may get left behind.
“I doubt who will benefit from a policy where the government directs salary increases,” CEB Monitor Group’s Ma said.
“In the final analysis, I think it will only raise government employees’ wages. This is what happened in 2006 and 2007.”
Software giant Microsoft yesterday said it will invest 280 million U.S. dollars to build a research and development center in Beijing and significantly expand its research team in the country.
The new R&D campus, set to accommodate 5,000 employees, will become Microsoft’s largest research center outside the United States when it is completed in 2010, said Zhang Yaqin, the company’s China chairman.
“Through investments such as this, we are building on our capabilities as one of Microsoft’s key global R&D centers,” said Zhang.
He said the company will hire 1,000 new research employees in China in the next fiscal year, which starts in July.
Microsoft currently has 3,000 research staff in the country, with 1,500 full-time employees and another 1,500 working on a project basis, Dow Jones has reported. The company has said it will double the number of its full-time research employees in China to 3,000 in the next three years.
Last year, Microsoft invested about 280 million dollars in its R&D activities in the country, said Zhang Hongjiang, chief technology officer of Microsoft’s China R&D Group. The company also recruited 1,000 new employees to its China R&D Group last year, making it Microsoft’s largest research team outside the US.
About 80 percent of the company’s 3,000 research staff in the country develop products for worldwide users and only 20 percent of them work specifically for demand from emerging markets such as China, Zhang said.
“But I expect this percentage to grow in the future,” he said.
Microsoft started its first R&D center in China as early as 1995. The company now has research facilities in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
These investments are said to have helped Microsoft win support from the Chinese government and boosted sales in the Chinese market.
PC shipments in China reached 36.84 million units last year, research firm IDC has said. It predicted the number to grow at an average rate of 17.2 percent until 2011, when shipments will hit 64.94 million units.
The country also has the world’s largest number of Internet and mobile phone users, offering what is believed to be huge opportunities for IT companies.
Microsoft does not disclose its revenue from the Chinese market. But Fortune Magazine estimated in a story last year that the software giant’s revenue from China would exceed 700 million dollars last year, about 1.5 percent of Microsoft’s global sales.
BEVERLY HILLS, California (Reuters) – Google Inc, the world’s Internet services leader, plans to boost hiring in China by one-third this year and increase promotional spending to win market share, a senior company executive said on Saturday.
Lee Kai-Fu, Google’s president for Greater China, said in an interview that the Silicon Valley company intends to add 200 staffers in 2008 to its existing 600 employees and to keep up that level of hiring for the next three to five years.
The new jobs will be in technology and sales and marketing and half of the jobs will go to new university graduates, Lee told Reuters on the sidelines of the Committee of 100 conference, an annual gathering of Chinese-American leaders. The three-day event in Beverly Hills ends on Saturday.
Google, one of the most popular places to work among recent graduates, has sharply curtailed hiring. The company has hired around 800 new employees worldwide in each of the past two quarters, excluding acquisitions, half the rate of a year ago.
Google, China’s No. 2 provider of Web search services behind domestic market leader Baidu.com Inc, also will increase promotional spending for its products such as Google Maps and its e-mail service called Gmail, Lee said.
“You will not see a Google advertisement on TV but you will see more and more promotions and advertisements about Google’s products at Chinese Web sites,” Lee said, describing how Google plans to rely on search ads instead of conventional marketing.
He said Google also would look to strike more profit-sharing partnerships with Web site operators along the lines of one it already has with Chinese Internet media site Sina.com for news, advertising and search services.
The goal is for Google to boost its own online advertising revenue in China, where millions of young Chinese people are rapidly adopting Internet shopping, Lee said.
“Advertising is our core revenue in China, just like anywhere else for Google,” he said. “I believe online advertising in China has very big market potential.”
Google Web search advertising services brought in virtually all of the company’s $16.6 billion in revenue last year. It had 19,156 employees at the end of March, including around 1,500 that joined through its DoubleClick acquisition in March.
Lee’s remarks follow comments by Google Chairman and Chief Executive Eric Schmidt earlier this week of improved business in China. “We are seeing market share growth and good revenue growth as we have learned to operate in that environment,” he told investors on a conference call to discuss financial results.
Company introduction:
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Report To: Sales & Marketing Director Asia Pacific
Location: Shanghai
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Company description: Our Client is one of the leading global services providers in insurance, banking and asset management.
Title: Vice President – Sales, Financial Services, Insurance
Location: Shanghai
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* Please send us your complete resume (both in Chinese and in English to: ‘topjob_fi179sh@dacare.com'(Please replace “#” with “@”)
* In the email subject MUST you plus the position name ?in either En or Ch ?
Company description: Our Client is one of the leading global services providers in insurance, banking and asset management.
Title: Product Marketing Manager – Insurance
Location: Shanghai or Shenzhen
Job Responsibilities
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2) Experience of customer insight exploration, product feature quantification, unique selling point formation, by working with research group.
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5) 5 years more working experience in respective profession.
* Please send us your complete resume (both in Chinese and in English to: ‘topjob_mkt238sh@dacare.com'(Please replace “#” with “@”)
* In the email subject MUST you plus the position name ?in either En or Ch ?