Archives January 2009

Treasury Manager (fi199sh)

Job Title: Treasury Manager
Location: Shanghai China

Our client is a leading global pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and medical Device outsourcing company. It mainly provides clients laboratory and manufacturing services to help them shorten the time and lower the cost of drug and medical device R&D. Their mother company is a New York Stock Exchange listed company. Because of their business expansion, they are looking for talents to join them.

Responsibilities
1. Assist treasury director to manage and control cash flow of each BU
2. Provide cash flow analysis and make recommendations on funding arrangement.
3. Contact HQ relationship banks in China for service and operation improvements.
4. Implement cash management, including cash pooling, hedging, FX deal and excess cash short term investment;
5. Assist treasury director in insurance management and communication with subsidiaries under European financing structure.

Requirements:
1. University graduate preferable with professional accounting qualification or equivalent
2. Accounting or finance?
3. CET 4 above and can communicate in English both in written and oral
4. Familiar with excel, powerpoint and word?
5. At least 3 years of relevant experience
6. CPA/CFA preferred but not a must
7. Experience with insurance, F/X and tax
8. Solid accounting knowledge and good business acumen
9. Self-motivated, Able to work efficiently without close supervision
* Please send us your complete resume (in Chinese and in English) to: ‘topjob_fi199sh@dacare.com'(Please replace “#” with “@”)
* In the email subject please include the position name and job #

Projects Controller (fi198sh)

Job Title: Projects Controller
Report To: Finance Controller
Location: Shanghai
Our client is a world leader in AFC (Automatic Fare Collection) systems for public transport. It successfully completed many metro projects for numerous cities around the world. With the fast development of metro industry in China, Asia and many other countries, our client will reinforce their entity in R&D, program management and other operational positions.
Job Description:
Responsibilities:
1 Analyze, evaluate the cost (technology) for the projects and provide budget or offer to clients.
2 Responsible for the risk calculation & control of the projects;
3 Follow up the cost condition of projects; provide the necessary supporting to project review (forecast and suggestion).
4 Take part in preparing the cost control rule and follow up the enforce status.
5 Carry out financial reviews, ensuring submitted forecasts are in-line with the business environment and in compliant with Group reporting requirements
6 Verify that Business Plans prepared by operating companies deliver on the strategy.
7 Oversee licensing, royalty and other such agreements and monitoring rights and obligations.
8 Ensure operating companies are in compliant with local tax requirements including the most tax efficient structures and operating procedures.
9 Implement Competency framework and Back to Basics processes to all the Finance Departments
10 Lead in financial planning to maximize cash returns r and improve the company’s working capital management.
11 Other works assigned by GM or DGM.
Requirements
1 B.Sc. Finance, accounting, economic or equivalent.
2 5+ years working experience in cost management and risk control in Manufacturing or Software company
3 CPA or ACCA qualification ;
4 Good knowledge of procurement, manufacturing and logistic
5 Good ability of communication. Good English Level
6 Good ability of using Excel and PPT to analyze and evaluate figures
* Please send us your complete resume (in Chinese and in English) to: ‘topjob_fi198sh@dacare.com'(Please replace “#” with “@”)
* In the email subject please include the position name and job #

China’s disabled see mixed job fortunes in 2008

About 331,000 disabled Chinese in the urban areas found jobs in 2008, bringing the total to 4.67 million, but the number employed in rural areas saw a marked drop, statistics from the China Disabled Persons’ Federation show.

The number of employed disabled people in rural areas fell by almost 930,000 to 16.04 million in 2008, said Wang Xinxian, secretary of the China Disabled Persons’ Federation Committee of the Communist Party of China.

Wang was addressing a national work conference in Hangzhou, capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, Monday. Wang did not explain the contrast at the conference.

With the help of government and non-governmental programs, 6,193 disabled applicants were admitted into colleges and universities last year, and 675,000 received job training, federation figures showed.

Almost 102,000 homes of poverty-stricken disabled people in rural areas were renovated last year and about 3.17 million disabled people came under social insurance programs that included pension schemes, medical, unemployment and industrial accident insurance, the figures showed.

Wang said the priority this year was to speed up the building of social security and service systems for the disabled, especially for those in rural areas.

The federation would endeavor to improve education and living standards for China’s 83 million disabled, who account for 6.34 percent of total population.

The federation jointly launched a three-year project with the Ministry of Science and Technology on Monday to invest 150 million yuan ($21.94 million) to develop technologies and products that may facilitate information access for the disabled.

Shanghai to look for talents abroad

Shanghai plans to send recruiters overseas once again to fill top financial jobs in Shanghai, a senior government official said.

Huang Weimao, an official with the Shanghai municipal human resources and social security bureau, said on Sunday that the bureau is taking more Chinese enterprises, colleges and institutions to Washington in May for a job fair aimed at overseas Chinese graduates.

“We are collecting information about the types and number of talents that are most in need,” Huang said.

“We need talents in information technology, life sciences, pharmaceutical, finance, modern services, and auto making,” he said. “But still, we will target mainly financial talents.”

Huang said that the compensation packages many Chinese enterprises are offering are similar to those in developed countries.

You Weishun, director of North America Chinese Scholars International Exchange Center, said that China should take advantage of the current economic situation to attract overseas candidates.

The economic recession has left more than 100,000 Wall Street workers unemployed. He estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 of them are Chinese, many of whom are willing to work in China.

“Plus their salary expectation has dropped almost to half, from about US$80,000 per year to about 300,000 yuan per year,” he told the paper.

And Shanghai has always been attractive to overseas workers, according to Huang.

In 2008, more than 5,000 overseas Chinese graduates moved to Shanghai for a job, excluding Shanghai residents who graduated from overseas schools and returned home.

Migrant workers try hand at entrepreneurship in hometowns

NANCHANG – Half a year after being laid off by a Beijing-based electronic product sales company amid the global slowdown, Yu Yanbin has become his own boss, running a leather product factory in his hometown.

Yu went back home to Gangbei Village, Xinjian County of east China’s Jiangxi Province in May. Following the suggestion of a township official, he set up the factory — Jiangxi Haobo Science and Technology Development Co., Ltd. — in August.

“I do not need to pay rent or taxes. The government will pay half of the interest on my loan of 50,000 yuan,” equivalent to about US$7,320, said Yu, 31. “All this ensured a smooth beginning.”

Across the country, millions of migrant workers have gone home earlier than they did in previous years for the Lunar New Year holiday, since the factories they worked at closed or suspended production as the world economy slowed.

The Ministry of Agriculture said some 7.8 million migrant workers had returned home. Many fear they won’t be able to find new jobs after the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, so they might just stay home.

The government has offered loans and tax cuts or exemptions to encourage these returnees to start their own businesses. A two-day annual central rural work conference last month decided the government would help returned farmers become entrepreneurs through loans, speedier permit approvals, tax cuts or exemptions and counseling.

Tan Sanguo, a Xinjian County official, said some 2,000 migrant workers had returned home. Some were growing mushrooms, while others had set up building material plants.

“Migrant workers have gained some knowledge of the market economy and non-agricultural industries after years of work in cities,” said Cui Chuanyi, a rural economy researcher of the Development Research Center under the State Council, or cabinet.

Many also have accumulated savings and mastered certain skills, he added. “All these are favorable conditions for them to start businesses.”

The expert said it was necessary to encourage migrant workers to start their own businesses, given the critical employment situation. Running a rural business would contribute to development in the countryside, he said.

But many of these former migrants lack the capital and technical skills to go into business for themselves.

A survey conducted by agricultural authorities and banks in June showed more than 50 percent of 400 rural youths they interviewed lacked funds and technology to start businesses.

Tang Nianzhou, 32, a former migrant worker from Wucun Village, Changxing County of Zhejiang Province, leased 5.3 hectares and planted some distinctive local crops such as tea. But he’s been troubled by lack of funds.

In November, he managed to get a 100,000 yuan low-interest loan from the county’s Rural Cooperative Bank. “That helps a lot,” he said.

Job loss in real estate sector on the rise

Falling sales and tumbling prices have forced many real estate companies in major Chinese cities to cut jobs, slash salaries and trim commissions.

Some property developers are known to have laid off as many as half of their staff in the past several months.

“The cost of human resources accounts for a big share of the cash flow though it occupies a very small share in the real estate developing cost,” said Li Wenjie, a managing director from Centaline Property Agency Ltd. “Since projects do not sell well in current market, it is hard to maintain a liquid cash flow”? forcing developers to cut salary expenses, he said.

Zhujiang Real Estate Company in Guangzhou is reported to have retrenched nearly 40 percent of its total staff, while cutting the salaries of the remaining ones by up to 30 percent.

“In the past, we were used to fat year-end bonuses and other rewards,” said a salesperson with a Bejing-based high-end property developer. “This year, we are worrying about our jobs.”

Despite reassurances from top management, the staff morale at Vantone, a leading Chinese property developer, has been depressed by the layoffs in units involved in different development projects. “We aren’t sure how many (people) have gone,” a source in the company said. “I don’t know when it will be me.”

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, real estate investment growth slowed to 22.7 percent in the first 11 months of 2008, down from 31.8 percent in a year earlier period.

The China Real Estate Index Academy forecasts that the real estate investment growth will slow further in 2009. It said that many large real-estate companies have remained confident in the long term. But short-term uncertainties have forced many to trim their investment plans.

China to promote graduates’ employment

BEIJING – The State Council, or cabinet, pledged on Wednesday to give top priority to the employment of university graduates, reflecting the spread of the global financial crisis and the “austere” job situation.

Premier Wen Jiabao presided over a cabinet meeting on the issue of employment of university graduates. The meeting called these graduates China’s “valuable human resources”.

The council decided to adopt more measures to promote the employment of university graduates.

Subsidies and social insurance will be offered to graduates who work in villages and communities, and the government will help those who work in remote areas or join the Army to repay student loans, the meeting decided.

The government is encouraging graduates to work for small or private companies, the meeting said, noting that incentives will be given to companies that employ these graduates. It also urged large companies to hire more university graduates.

Graduates are encouraged to start businesses, with favorable tax and loan policies, the meeting said.

It also ordered universities to improve their job placement services, by providing free information and helping graduates find jobs.

The meeting also decided to set up and improve a mechanism to assist university graduates from poor families.

According to published reports, China had nearly 5.6 million university graduates in 2008, and this year, the figure is expected to top 6 million.

China vows to boost employment in 2009

Amid waves of job cuts worldwide, China has embarked on active measures to minimize job cuts and has pledged to boost employment this year.

The financial crisis continues to hurt the fourth largest economy and pushed many enterprises to cut their headcounts.

The following provinces are among the many in the country that have striven to stabilize their job markets.

South China’s Yangtze River Delta, a major manufacturing center, has been hit unexpectedly hard. Job vacancies in the manufacturing sector stood at 41.43 percent of the total in the eastern Zhejiang province in the third quarter, a record low in recent years.

The same situation occurred to manufacturers in the eastern Jiangsu province with job vacancies in the sector accounting for 50.15 percent of the total, down 0.94 percent over the same period last year, and down 4.16 percent from the second quarter.

To cushion the regions from the effects of the global crisis, the Yangtze Delta has set up an early warning system to conduct monitoring of the job situation. At present, six cities including Nanjing, Hangzhou and Ningbo are the trial areas.

The system is designed for regional labor and social security offices to collect employment information, such as the possible job cuts and the planned new recruits in the following week and the actual cuts.

Zhejiang province will do this in 11 cities this year.

At the end of November, Zhejiang also cut back enterprises’ payments of social security funds for employees to mitigate their burden.

Another focus of most cities in the region is to encourage people to start businesses. Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces pledge to kick in favorable measures including free skill training for laid-off workers.

Officials and experts said the region expects a tougher job picture in the first quarter of this year as the global financial turmoil continued to spread.

Shanghai has launched programs to provide graduates and migrant workers with subsidies for skill training. On Dec 30, 2008, the first employment service base was set up in Shanghai for graduates to gain internship experiences.

The Shanghai government also encouraged business start-ups to increase jobs. The city pledged to limit the registered unemployment rate to below 4.5 percent.

Hong Kong posted its registered unemployment rate at 3.8 percent between September to November, up from 3.5 percent between August and October, an extra 4,600 jobless.

Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, chief executive of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, said the current government work aimed at guaranteeing stability of job markets.

In early December last year, the Hong Kong government took a series of steps to create more than 60,000 posts in 2009. For example, the spending on infrastructure would be raised to about HK$40 billion, which would provide 55,000 jobs, 12,000 more than last year. The government would also add 7,700 public servant jobs.

Employers in China Have Issues Shedding Workers

Companies that rushed into China during the boom years may find it difficult amid the global downturn to extract themselves, labor law attorneys say.

“It wasn’t too long ago when the burning issue was hiring, recruiting and retention,” said Joseph Deng, a labor contract attorney with Baker & McKenzie in China. “Now it seems the No. 1 issue for many companies in China is cost cutting, termination and redundancies.”

Landmark labor laws enacted in China this year have strengthened protections for workers, including wage standards and Social Security benefits. But worker protections against employers looking to downsize their workforce may be among the most stringent, China law experts say.

Chinese labor law prohibits “at will” firing practices common in the U.S., which means employers must have a legal basis for firing any employee.

“The first thing you have to keep in mind is that employees have contracts,” Deng said. “You cannot unilaterally terminate a contract.”

Before making any layoffs, employers need to present their plans to employee-represented work councils at each company—called employee representative congresses, which are union organizations elected by employees. For employers whose workers have not organized into unions, any indication that the company intends to lay employees off could incite workers to organize.

Deng recommends that employers file a report of a strategic plan with local labor bureaus.

“They don’t approve a plan, but they play an important role in providing guidance,” he said.

Firing workers remains something of a taboo in China, as it is in much of Asia. Employers should present layoffs as part of a strategic plan rather than a cost-cutting measure, said Baker & McKenzie attorney Guenther Heckelmann, otherwise employers open themselves up to challenges from workers regarding how companies calculate their costs.

Employers are unlikely to be able to lay off groups of workers using criteria usually reserved for firing individuals, like showing a worker is incompetent or has behaved improperly. Employers must show a change in the company’s circumstances. For example, a company’s decision to idle a plant could qualify. Employers must then attempt to find new work for the employee before giving that person 30 days’ notice of his termination.

Dan Harris, a Seattle lawyer with the firm Harris & Moure, wrote in his China Law Blog that restrictions against at-will terminations may be the most stringently enforced requirements in China’s new labor law, which took effect January 1, 2008, and was preceded by a backlash among workers to worsening working conditions in China.

Harris wrote of a client who was told by a Chinese government official in Shangdong, a coastal province southeast of Beijing, that “so long as this company did not lay off any of its approximately 250 Chinese employees, the government would look the other way regarding other labor law violations.”

The popularity of the new law has tripled the number of disputes brought by workers against their employers, said Andreas Lauffs, the Hong Kong-based head of the employment law group at Baker & McKenzie.

“There’s not a single worker that doesn’t know this law inside out,” Lauffs said.

Earlier this year, a large multinational corporation represented by Baker & McKenzie negotiated severance packages with employee-established labor unions as a precondition for laying off the workers, Lauffs said.

All unions in China are organized under the nationalized All-China Federation of Trade Unions. While striking is illegal in China, workers have been known to engage in work stoppages and slowdowns. China legal experts are watching to see whether the economic slowdown will loosen the new contract laws in China.

The Chinese economy has been growing at around 12 percent a year. Officials have worried that a lower growth rate of 8 percent is the minimum needed to forestall public unrest. For now, though, the new labor laws remain intact.

“For multinationals, if they want to downsize as a result of the current economy, they’ll have to tread very, very cautiously,” Lauffs said. “China is no longer the place where you can go and set up shop with cheap labor and no labor laws.”

http://www.workforce.com/section/00/article/26/05/57.php

Call for more overseas talents

More effort should be made to attract outstanding overseas talents to work in China, the Ministry of Education said yesterday.

“High-level talents with overseas education and work experience will greatly strengthen China’s all-round development, especially as the country is implementing its strategy of invigorating the nation through science, technology and education,” Lu Yugang, director of the ministry’s talent development office, told China Daily.

The ministry, with the help of other ministries, has increased its financial support for overseas talents and simplified the approval procedure to help them gain “citizen treatment” in China aiming at attracting a group of leading scholars in certain disciplines across the world and forming a group of excellent innovation organizations in China, Lu said.

The ministry has been conducting some exemplary programs to attract scholars to China, he said.

The Chunhui (Spring Bud) Program is one of the programs targeting scholars with doctoral degrees and outstanding records, he said.

Launched in 1996, the program has already funded more than 12,000 individuals and 200 groups of scholars and researchers to serve the country on short-term visits.

Science and Technology Minister Wan Gang is a beneficiary of the program.

Wan was a member of a German automobile research team that got financial support from the program in the late 1990s. He returned to China to work in 2000 and became the president of Tongji University in Shanghai in 2004.

Another of the ministry’s programs – the Changjiang Scholars Program, which was set up in 1998 in association with the Hong Kong-based Li Ka-Shing Foundation – has provided financial support to 1,308 leading scholars to devote themselves to the construction of key subjects and academic teams in 115 colleges across China.

The scholars each get a 100,000 yuan ($14,615) annual allowance, research funds and good working conditions provided by the universities.

The Changjiang program has increased the number of scholars to 100 a year since 2004 from 10 in the previous years, and last year began awarding 1-million yuan grants to its top 5 scholars.

More than 98 of the scholars have PhDs and 367 were of foreign nationality, though mostly ethnic Chinese, statistics showed.

Peking University has introduced famous math professor Tian Gang from Princeton University in the United States, while Tsinghua University introduced biological professor Shi Yigong from the same university.

Rao Zihe, 58, president of Nankai University in Tianjin returned to China to work in 1996 after 10 years overseas.

“I gave up my research work at Oxford University and came back to China, attracted by the promising outlook of my motherland and good offers by universities,” he said.