Recruiting in China

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) -- China's largest automobile manufacturer by sales, SAIC Motor Corp., said Wednesday it expects to post 10 times as much net profit in 2009 as it did in the previous year on the back of a robust jump in sales.

The passenger car and commercial vehicle maker said it expected an increase of more than 900% in 2009 net profit after a 57% jump in vehicle sales to 2.72 million units during the year, according to a filing with the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

SAIC, which operates joint ventures with General Motors Co. and Volkswagen AG (VLKA.Y 21.70, +0.05, +0.23%) , said earnings per share was expected above 1 yuan in 2009, up from about 0.1 yuan in 2008. That compares with analysts' median estimate of 0.93 yuan a share, according to FactSet Research.

The company's strong sales growth in 2009 was aided by government incentives to new car buyers aimed at boosting domestic consumption in the face of the global economic downturn.

However, SAIC (CN:600104 25.24, -0.41, -1.60%) shares were down 2% by mid-morning in a choppy trading session in Shanghai Wednesday, giving up early gains in spite of the performance.

BEIJING, Dec 12 (Reuters) - In the first 10 months of the year China already exceeded the number of new jobs it aimed to create in 2009, state media said on Saturday, in another sign the country is emerging from the global economic crisis.

China created 9.4 million jobs in urban areas in the first 10 months, exceeding the government's target of 9 million new jobs for the year, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

It added that about 4.4 million laid-off workers found new work in the January-October period, some 88 percent of the full-year goal of 5 million.

Officials had estimated that more than 20 million migrant workers lost jobs when the global financial crisis hit the Chinese economy, making job creation a priority for the government in its stimulus spending.

On Tuesday, the ministry estimated that China's stimulus spending was on track to create at least 24 million jobs, offering its rosiest employment outlook since the financial crisis struck last year.

A recovery in employment is an essential precondition for Beijing to wind down its ultra-loose pro-growth policies adopted when the global financial turmoil devastated Chinese exports, leading factories to cut millions of jobs. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Bill Tarrant)

CHANGCHUN, Jan 03, 2010 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- The global economic meltdown impacted many of the clients of BT Frontline, which provides outsourcing services for the IT systems of docks and logistics companies. But its General Manager, Lawrence Low, is still satisfied with the company's performance amid the financial crisis and confident about its future.

China's service outsourcing industry, mostly about software outsourcing, bounced back in the second half of the year from a hard time of three months caused by shrinking demand from the global market, according to Yu Hengzhuang, vice president of Dalian Software Park.

"We have gained access to high-end market and recently entered the Middle East market, which more than offset the impact of the global downturn," Low said.

"Our business not only survived, it grew and thrived," Low said with a smile, keeping the exact figures as business secret.

RAPIDLY DEVELOPING INDUSTRY The software outsourcing park in Dalian, the industrial hub in China, attracted 63 new clients in 2009, bringing the overall number of businesses in the park to more than 400, and the park's total sales are expected to top 20 billion yuan, up 32.9 percent year on year.

The sales of Dalian's software outsourcing business grew from 200 million yuan (29.3 million U.S. dollars) to more than 30 billion yuan in the past 10 years. A total of 700 companies are in the industry, including 300 joint ventures and more than 40 Fortune 500 companies.

In the first ten months, the industry's sales in Dalian grew by 33 percent to 33.7 billion yuan and its export grew by 34 percent to 1.1 billion U.S. dollars.

While Dalian has become a world famous hub of software outsourcing after Thomas Fridman compared it with Bangalore in India, another less known industrial hub with equally fast pace in east China's Jiangsu Province, is taking shape.

The contract value of Jiangsu's software outsourcing industry reached 3.28 billion U.S. dollars in the first 10 months of the year, a growth of 174 percent. The province has 2,470 companies in the industry, with 290,000 employees, according to statistics from the provincial department of commerce.

The provincial capital Nanjing's software outsourcing industry had a contract value of 2.1 billion U.S. dollars in the first 11 months of the year, growing by 239 percent.

"The income of China's software industry, which software outsourcing takes a major part, has been growing by 38 percent annually and its revenue is expected to top 1 trillion yuan in 2010," said Hu Kunshan, vice chairman of China Software Industry Association.

China's software industry earned 757.3 billion yuan in 2008, and the figure is expected to reach 900 billion yuan in 2009.

BOOSTING EMPLOYMENT The rapid development of outsourcing industry bears great significance in sustaining economic growth, restructuring economy, stabilizing export and boosting employment, said Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan during a visit to Dalian in November.

More than 60,000 people are working in the software outsourcing industry in Dalian.

China's outsourcing industry recruited 690,000 new employees, 460,000 of whom were college graduates, in the first 11 months of 2009, according to statistics released on a national conference on commerce.

China's Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security expects the outsourcing industry to create 1.2 million new jobs in five years, including 1 million jobs for college graduates.

At the end of Sept. 2009, 1.42 million people were working in 8,060 outsourcing companies in China, said Qian Fangli, deputy head of the foreign investment department of the Ministry of Commerce.

The software outsourcing companies in China have enough programmers but lack mature project managers and decision makers, who are on the top of the talent pyramid, said Yu Hengzhuang, vice president of Dalian Software Park.

The gap in talent pool limited the size of such companies to less than 300 people, which is a human resource threshold to carry out core projects with high added value. "That's why Chinese companies are now the lowest ring of the world software outsourcing chain," Yu added.

By DANIEL H. ROSEN

While everyone is glad to put 2009 behind them, 2010 could be an even tougher economic year for China. To climb out of the global contraction, Beijing has engineered a property bubble characterized by oversupply in commercial real estate and unsustainable price gains for residential property. The consequences of this will bite in the new year.

To soak up and justify this excess, China's leaders are trying to stoke demand by accelerating the already epic urbanization trend, reducing constraints on migration and urban registration. The leadership is betting on the connection between accelerated urbanization and consumption, too. In 2008, 43% of China's population was considered urban, versus an average of 79% for Latin America, 73% in the euro area and 82% in the U.S: China still has a long way to go.

By front-loading this urban growth, China will bolster prices for upstream raw materials like iron ore and aluminum in the near term and keep construction companies busy. But many people are concerned that China's urban factories already are overbrimming with overcapacity in almost all sectors, and boosting urban migration will just aggravate overproduction, which will spill into world markets.

If China is already suffering overcapacity in everything, then indeed swelling the urban population would just exacerbate problems. But it isn't. In fact, there are huge swaths of economic activity and employment simply missing from the Chinese marketplace. Policies that address the reasons for this can create tens of millions of new jobs in traditional and new sectors in the years ahead, adding to domestic consumption and diverting the country from a collision course with its trading partners.

Consider three sectors: healthcare, manufacturing white collar, and education.

Healthcare: China has 1.6 doctors per thousand people; the U.S. has more than 23. Not that China wants to replicate everything about U.S. healthcare, but given rising pathology and mortality due to aging baby boomers, changes in diet, lifestyle, longevity and environmental contamination, filling this shortfall is critical. Reaching the U.S. ratio would mean adding almost 30 million doctors, not to mention multiples of the current low numbers of supporting staff—nurses, palliative-care specialists, hospital administrators and hundreds of other subspecialties comprising the modern healthcare sector.

Manufacturing White Collar: For all its storied manufacturing-sector prowess, China's goods makers skimp on R&D, quality control, brand management, financial planning, environmental-health safety and almost every other white-collar position that turns a manufactured commodity into a branded product and generates intangible value for the firm: value that makes up a third or more of assets in most Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development firms.

While China Inc. may have overcapacity on the assembly line, it has extraordinary undercapacity in the business functions that turn a $10 generic toaster coming out of a Chinese factory into a $75 Braun-branded toaster sold at retail in the U.S. or Europe.

China would need at least 60 million more white-collar workers to be comparable with the U.S. on this score. Given the different development levels, we might cut that in half, but 30 million missing office-worker bees is a lot of jobs.

Education: The missing-jobs number is also huge in education. China has 10 teachers per thousand people, as opposed to 22 in the U.S. Basic education for urban migrant-workers' children is a critical task if accelerated urbanization is to generate more prosperity and not just worsening income inequality, social tension and developmental problems like crime and an underclass. China currently needs another 16 million teachers to reach the ratio in the U.S., as well as attendant teacher-trainers, guidance counselors, school administrators, and other related employees.

Of course there are reasons why these jobs don't already exist.

In the case of healthcare and education, Beijing has chosen to save resources or transfer them to state-owned enterprises rather than make sufficient public expenditures, while simultaneously preventing private enterprises from investing in these areas as businesses. There are some low-price private hospitals and clinics in China, but with limited resources and market shares. In manufacturing, the cost of capital to build up white collar employment for private and SME firms is typically two-to-five times that of the low nominal rates heavier state-owned enterprises enjoy. And when they are able to build a brand and their own intellectual property, poor enforcement of regulations and intellectual-property protection jeopardizes their ability to recover their investment.

These three sectors just scratch the surface of new job potential: China is far from suffering "overcapacity in everything." The problem is that what is overcapacity doesn't create many jobs.

Steel, aluminum, cement, plate glass and upstream petrochemicals together create just 14 million jobs in a labor pool of 780 million, which is fewer than the number of service-sector jobs in Guangdong Province alone.

China's consumption-urbanization policy thinking is the right way to go, but only if policy simultaneously addresses the biases in the financial sector that starve job-creating sectors while larding other industries with capital. What China needs to make its urbanization strategy the solution rather than an unsustainable bubble machine, to put it simply, is affirmative action for labor-intensive industries.

Private equity investments in China lead to the creation of more jobs and spending on research and development than their publicly listed counterparts, a survey showed on Thursday.

Private equity has sometimes been viewed with apprehension in China, particularly when large state firms have been the targets of investments.

In a survey dating from 2002 to 2008, the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China said that the economic and social impact of private equity investments was quite positive.

Total employment at firms backed by private equity grew by 16 percent over that period, twice as much as at publicly listed companies, the EU Chamber said in a report. Salaries also grew more quickly, it said.

"Private equity's qualitative impact on hiring and compensation is helping to move China's economy toward greater domestic consumption and more secure social stability," it said in a report.

Research and development spending as a percentage of revenue in PE-financed firms was more than 2.5 times that of their publicly listed peers, it added.

PE-backed firms saw a 39 percent average increase in profits over that period when compounded annually, compared with 25 percent among publicly listed companies, the Chamber said. (Reporting by Jason Subler; editing by Simon Jessop)

Simon Rabinovitch and Aileen Wang

China's manufacturing sector steamed ahead in December as strong rises in new orders and output drove a key economic survey to a 20-month high.

The official purchasing managers' index (PMI) jumped to 56.6 in December from 55.2 in the previous month, the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing (CFLP) said on Friday.

It was the tenth straight month that the index has stood above the watershed mark of 50, indicating an expansion of activity.

As the biggest month-on-month rise since March, it also suggested that the Chinese manufacturing sector, far from plateauing after its recovery, has actually gathered momentum.

“December's PMI reading suggests sustained expansion in industrial activity,” Jing Ulrich, chairman of China equities at J.P. Morgan, said in a research note. “The forward-looking components of PMI indicate continued expansion in both domestic and external demand.”

But a slower expansion of new export orders for the second straight month may offer pause to officials who have been extremely cautious in winding down loose, pro-growth policies, believing that domestic stimulus is still needed to counteract sluggish external demand.

“The fall in the indicator for new export orders warrants attention, as it shows we must avoid undue optimism about the improvement in the international marketplace,” said Zhang Liqun, a researcher at the State Council's Development Research Centre who comments on the PMI for the logistics federation.

Another mildly discordant note among the otherwise rosy survey was the reading for input prices, which climbed to a 17-month high of 66.7 in December, up from 63.4 in November.

“The input price rise shows that the production cost of enterprises are climbing. Enterprises should work to increase their capability to withstand rising costs,” Zhang said.

Worries about price rises have emerged again in China after deflation for much of 2009, with top leaders saying that controlling inflationary expectations will be one of their priorities this year.

The dominant theme of the PMI, though, was the broadening strength of China's recovery. Seventeen of 20 industries surveyed reported an expansion in activity, with metal products the strongest and tobacco at the low end.

China's economy shot back to nearly double-digit growth in 2009 after nearly standing still at the end of 2008, giving a lift to Asia and countries that have been able to feed its voracious appetite for commodities.

An unexpected surge in South Korean exports in December was the latest evidence of how economies that are intertwined with China have benefited.

China's PMI also showed that the country's job market has continued to improve. The employment sub-index hit 52.2 in December, up from 51.1 in the previous month, as 12 of 20 industries reported increases in hiring.

Many analysts believe that two crucial preconditions for China to begin tightening policy more aggressively are a recovery in employment and a sustained increase in exports.

At the height of the global financial crisis, China's central planners worried the country would be unable to reach the 8 per cent growth deemed necessary to maintain employment and avert social instability.

The country's 4 trillion yuan stimulus package, complemented by a record surge in bank lending, propelled the economy to 8.9 per cent year-on-year growth in the third quarter of 2009 and put it on track for even faster expansion this year.

“We expect China's strong economic growth momentum to continue in 2010, with the major source of growth coming from a broad-based improvement in private consumption, and further strengthening in private housing investment, and a solid recovery in exports,” Ulrich said.