Recruiting in China

Thanks to last year's bullish market, the financial sector provided the most lucrative jobs in China and fund management talents topped the 2007 salary rankings, The Economic Observer reported on Monday.

Executives, fund managers and high-caliber investment researchers were the top earners, according to Taihe Consulting, a human resources company, after conducting a survey on 15 large fund management companies in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen.

Industry insiders have attributed the high earnings to a shortage of fund management talents and the thriving fund businesses in 2007.

Even the current bearish market has not shown an adverse effect on fund employees' incomes yet.

Statistics collected by Taihe in June indicated no signs of fixed income reductions among fund management employees. And flexible income was closely related to companies' performances, it found. Some companies can still collect remarkable management fees in 2008 that are no less than last year's, Taihe said.

The cash income of an employee comprises a fixed part and a flexible part in addition to their benefit package. The fixed part is made up of basic salary and allowances, and the flexible, accounting for 30 to 40 percent of the total income, is given as a merit-based bonus, such as year-end bonuses, or as sales commissions. Some positions even offer a flexible income that takes up as much as 50 percent of the total.

An employee with a Shenzhen-based fund management said: "The fixed salary was set at the beginning of the year, so there would be no big change. The flexible part may vary from person to person…some fund managers won't necessarily get a smaller year-end bonus, because the payment is based on the rankings of fund performances."

By contrast, listed securities companies already registered a year-on-year drop of 8.6 percent in salary payments in the first half of 2008, with some employees' incomes reduced by more than 60 percent, according to a report by Shanghai Securities News in August.

From a regional perspective, fund management companies in Shanghai, a national financial hub, offered the most lucrative jobs in 2007, Taihe's survey showed. Beijing came second and Shenzhen third.

The consulting company found that the lower-end salaries of fund management, real estate and high-tech sectors were quite similar. But at the very top level, the financial sector offered salaries that doubled what the high-tech gave, with real estate coming somewhere in between.

"Financial employees earned much higher salaries than people in the other industries in 2007," a Taihe analyst said. "And undoubtedly the most lucrative jobs came from the fund sector."