All posts by ChinaJob

Salary and potential trump city size among job hunters: survey

After graduating from the Communication University of China in Beijing, Chen Xiao left the capital to work for an education institution in Southwest China’s Chongqing municipality.

“I don’t have a sense of belonging in Beijing. It is hard for me to get used to the climate and life style,” Chen said.

“Rent, traffic expenditure, and meals take a large bite out of our salaries,” Chen said. “And if I stay in Beijing, it’s likely that most of my time will be occupied by work.” Life is not only for working, she added.

“I know it is very hard to live there. Many people work in Beijing for some years and then return to their hometowns, saying their work experience can help them gain better jobs. But I think it is better to return after university,” she said.

Chen is one of a growing number of graduates who choose to leave first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and work in second-tier cities such as Wuhan, Changsha and Chengdu.

Although small and less developed, these cities have favorable conditions, including entrepreneurial incentives, housing subsidies, registered residence permits, or Hukou, and settlement policies, to encourage talent to live and work here.

Instead of swarming to first-tier cities, more students said salary and development space were more important factors than city size when they came to decide in which cities to start their career, a recently survey found.

The survey, which was conducted by a research center under China Youth Daily, canvassed 2,002 college students and graduates, and found 64.3 percent said salary was the first thing they considered when choosing which city to base themselves in, followed by the potential for career development, at 59.3 percent, and city size, 43.9 percent.

Around 59.9 percent said they hoped second-tier cities could provide a more relaxing environment for employees and entrepreneurs, while 49.7 percent said the cities’ preferential terms were attractive.

Compared with first-tier cities, second-tier equivalents needed to improve public service systems, according to 63.7 percent of respondents, with 58.3 percent saying they hoped these cities could expand their economic volume and create more jobs. About 33 percent of respondents said promoting cities’ soft power was crucial.

This year, the number of college graduates in China is expected to reach 7.95 million, an increase of 300,000 over last year, according to the Ministry of Education.

Some second-tier cities have offered various preferential policies to attract talents during graduation season. The most alluring policies for graduates are incentives for employment or starting up businesses (65.9 percent), favorable housing policies (64 percent) and easier Hukou policies (51 percent), the survey shows.

Jian Xinhua, a professor with Wuhan University, said high-quality labor was an important factor that could drive city development. Higher living costs and cut-throat competition in megacities was daunting. With favorable employment terms, second-tier cities would become more attractive to college graduates, it was added.

Live-streaming host becomes most in-demand job for Chinese college students

Live-streaming host is a most sought-after job for more and more Chinese college students.

Though the new profession is not well accepted by society, especially by parents, nowadays it is not rare to see college students hosting online broadcasts.

A junior student from Tsinghua University has earned at least 10,000 yuan (close to $1,500) since she started teaching high school students on a major live-streaming platform a month ago. In fact, this is a common story for a great number of Chinese college students.

Huajiao is the first Chinese live-streaming platform that offers a “college channel.” According to the site, more than a million college students from 98.7% of the country’s universities are using the platform to host shows. More than 10,000 of them are students from elite universities, 1,000 of whom are studying at Tsinghua University and Peking University, China’s top two schools.

College students have improved people’s impression on the profession. Rather than low-quality and vulgar performances, they are providing shows with more intelligence and talents.

Flexible working hours and high income are the major reasons for students to choose the emerging profession. Statistics show that the average monthly salary of college broadcasters on the platform of Huajiao is 16,000 yuan. Some earn as much as 1.9 million yuan a month, 275 times of the 2016 average monthly salary of white collar workers in Beijing.

A survey conducted by Communication University of China found that a quarter of China’s college students have hosted shows on live-streaming sites.

With further development of the industry, there will be more and more college students taking up the profession.

Xiaomi recruiting more MIUI 9 Beta Testers

MIUI 9 has been leaked already and we learned Xiaomi will bring picture-in-picture and split-screen features. Global Beta ROM has started rolling out and Xiaomi has been busy preparing for its official launch on July 26. It will be unveiled together with a new phone in a special event in China.

Beta testers are still needed to evaluate the MIUI 9. If you own a Xiaomi smartphone, you can volunteer to join the program. The Chinese OEM is recruiting more Beta Testers for MIUI 9 China ROM. The Global ROM is almost ready but this testing is only for China, at least, for now.

If you are already part of the MIUI community, you are automatically given the privilege to test MIUI 9 without having to apply. The first batch will be open to a limited number of testers for certain mobile devices.

Here is a list of Xiaomi phones that can test the MIUI 9:

Mi 6, Mi 5s Plus, Mi 5s, Mi 5c, Mi 5, Mi 4S, Mi 4c, Mi 4, Mi 3, Mi 2/2S, Mi MIX, Mi Max 2, Mi Max, Mi Note 2, Mi Note/Pro, Mi Pad 2, Mi Pad 1, Redmi Note 4X (MTK), Redmi Note 4X (SD), Redmi Note 4, Redmi Note 3 (MTK), Redmi Note 3 (SD), Redmi Note 2, Redmi Note, Redmi Pro, Redmi 4X, Redmi 4A, Redmi 4, Redmi 4 Prime, Redmi 3S/Prime, Redmi 3, Redmi 2A, Redmi 2/Prime, Redmi 1S, Redmi 1

Some of these latest Xiaomi models will get the MIUI 9 immediately: Redmi Note 4 (Qualcomm), Redmi Note 4X, and the Mi 6.

Graduates getting paid better, but still job-hopping

Last year’s graduates of local colleges started in jobs at wages 25 percent higher than their predecessors — more than 6,000 yuan ($886.75) a month.

But still over 21 percent have hopped from their first jobs, said a survey released by the city’s employment promotion center and the students’ affairs center.

The conclusions were based on officially registered information from the 97,000 students graduating from local colleges and who began working in Shanghai in 2016.

The report showed that those graduates’ average term of employment was 29.2 months — 0.4 months longer than their peers graduating in the previous year.

Now, 95.9 percent of the these graduates choosing to work in Shanghai are still employed, 1.2 percentage points more than the survey result in the previous year.

Almost 70 percent of them worked in areas related to what they had learned in colleges, said the report.

About 80 percent of them said they were very satisfied or relatively satisfied with their jobs, while 6.1 percent said they were not quite satisfied or very dissatisfied.

Their average salary one year after graduation was 6,236 yuan per month, up 25 percent from their starting pay.

The average salary for 2015 graduates was 5,659 yuan a month after the same period of working.

The current average pay was 4,645 yuan a month for junior college graduates, 5,495 for those with a bachelor’s degree and 8,972 for those with master’s or higher.

The finance industry still leads the pay level with 8,216 yuan per month, followed by education and health at 7,908 and 7,653 yuan per month respectively.

The proportion of job-hoppers was 2.6 points higher than that of graduates in 2015 during the first year after graduation.

Beijing named best city for entrepreneurship

Beijing was recently named the best mainland Chinese city for entrepreneurship in 2017.

The ranking emphasized the impact of a city’s policies and talents on its entrepreneurship. The main gauge was the enthusiasm of establishing start-ups, government policies and intellectual support.

Report shows that there are five major entrepreneurship regions in China, one of which is the North China region with Beijing and Tianjin at its core.

As the birthplace of the policy of innovation and entrepreneurship, Beijing has demonstrated increasing competitiveness in this aspect. A total of 1,450 Beijing enterprises are listed in the National Equities Exchange and Quotations, roughly equal to the combined total of those in Shanghai (878 enterprises) and Shenzhen (686 enterprises).

Beijing is also home to 174 national innovation and entrepreneurship platforms, still roughly the sum of those in Shanghai (89 platforms) and Shenzhen (86 platforms).

In addition, Beijing continued to relocate non-capital functions in 2016, which will grant more development opportunities to neighboring cities including the newly established Xiongan New Area.

New Beijing Hyundai plant completed in Chongqing

A new Beijing Hyundai plant was completed in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality Thursday, raising the company’s annual capacity by 22 percent to 1.65 million units.

The plant, the fifth factory of the company, will start operation in August, with an annual production of 300,000 automobiles and 200,000 engines.

Construction of the plant started in June 2015 with a total investment of 7.75 billion yuan (1.15 billion U.S. dollars).

Beijing Hyundai is a joint venture between Beijing Automotive Industry Holding and the Republic of Korea car maker Hyundai Motor.

Chongqing’s auto output continued to take the lead in China, with automakers churning out 3.16 million cars last year, 11 percent of the country’s total.

The output values of the automobile and electronics manufacturing industries climbed 11.7 percent and 17.7 percent respectively in 2016, and the two industries contributed 55 percent to the city’s gross industrial growth last year.

Wanda to sell 13 tourism programs and 76 hotels to Sunac for $9.3 billion

Dalian Wanda Group agreed to sell 13 tourism programs as well as 76 hotels to Tianjin-based property company Sunac China Holding in a deal worth 63.17 billion yuan ($9.3 billion) on Monday, according to a statement Wanda sent to the Global Times the same day.

Sunac will acquire 91 percent of the 13 cultural and tourism programs, including those based in Xishuangbanna, Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, Hefei, capital of East China’s Anhui Province and Harbin, capital of Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, after paying 29.58 billion yuan to Wanda, the statement said. The Hong Kong-listed company will then undertake all the loans for developing those programs.

The company also agreed to buy out 76 hotels owned by Wanda, including Wanda Realm Beijing and Wanda Reign Wuhan for 33.6 billion yuan, the statement noted.

The two firms are expected to sign a detailed agreement by July 31 and complete the transfer of payment, assets and shares “as soon as possible”, according to the statement.

After the deals are settled, the transferred cultural and tourism programs will still use the Wanda brand. Wanda is also still responsible for their construction, operation and management.

As of 11:20 a.m., the share price of Dalian Wanda Commercial Properties, the Hong Kong-listed arm of Wanda, has surged to HK$ 1.16 (14.85 cents), almost double the number listed from the opening earlier this morning. The Sunac’s shares were suspended from trading on Monday ahead of the acquisition announcement.

Catering sector takes a bite out of sharing economy

In the restaurant street outside Beijing’s Ritan Park, the day starts slowly, but not for Guo Hongtao, manager of a take-out only restaurant. As online lunch orders begin to pour in, his 20-square-meter kitchen is gearing up for the day. The space is rented from Panda Selected, a start-up that offers co-cooking space to take-out kitchens.

Panda Selected also helps its tenants in a variety of ways, including designing logos, writing menus, planning online operations, connecting them with good suppliers, negotiating with food delivery platforms and applying for business licenses.

As some companies share kitchens with take-out only restaurants, some others share meals. Cengfanqu is one of the apps that bring foodies to household dining tables.

On the other side of the app, home chefs, most of them unemployed housewives living in the countryside, are more than happy to start their own business from home. By benefiting the local rural community, the app has also gained support from the local government.

China’s food takeout market totaled 113.3 billion yuan in 2016, according to business think tank Analysys. The massive market means opportunities for kitchen and meal sharing companies.

At the same time, industry insiders say, kitchen and meal sharing remain a fledgling segment of the market. They note that innovation and regulation are the key factors that could help make it a stable part of the sharing economy.

Multinational firms lose luster among Chinese students: survey

Multinational companies no longer enjoy recruitment advantages in China as domestic IT and Internet companies increasingly gain favor among Chinese students, according to data released Thursday by international consultancy Universum in Shanghai.

The Stockholm, Sweden-headquartered Universum received assessments of 233 employers from 79,346 students majoring in business, engineering, science, social sciences and humanities, law and medicine.

In the survey, 18 percent of Chinese students said they were willing to work for a multinational, a decrease from 25 percent in 2016 and 28 percent in 2015. The proportions were even lower among science and engineering majors—only 16 percent of engineering students and 14 percent of science students wanted to join a multinational after graduation. The students said multinationals were less stable than their domestic counterparts.

This year, the top five most attractive employers for business majors were Alibaba, Huawei, Bank of China, Ernst & Young, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, while the top five most favored by engineering students were Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and Microsoft.

Alibaba and Huawei were also attractive to other majors. Alibaba was the second most attractive employer among science students and the top among students of social sciences and humanities. Huawei took the first spot among science students, and was the second most popular among business students and majors in social sciences and humanities. Tencent also ranked high among various majors.

Chinese Internet companies were well known for competitive compensations that came with highly stressful workloads. But the survey found Chinese students attributed these companies’ attractiveness to their entrepreneurial spirit, creative working environment, team work and corporate social responsibility. The students valued “a sound support for future career development” when it came to choosing an employer.

Wu Gang, the vice-president of Universum’s Asia-Pacific region, said that “In recent years, through our surveys and research, we’ve found an obvious change. That is, China’s indigenous IT and Internet companies are becoming increasingly popular, while the competitive advantages multinationals used to enjoy are no longer that noticeable.”