Business environment China

In order to prepare my upstream research on the business environment in China, I found a book in the library called "New business practices in China" written by Benoît Ams and Bernhard Adriaensens. I therefore based my research mainly on this book, and on documents sent by our teacher. For this session, I decided to summarize and synthesize everything I'd learned beforehand and during the exchange with our Chinese correspondents in a SWOT table.

Firstly, I learned that, while China offers a huge and growing market potential, it's also a complex and heterogeneous one. Indeed, in the book I read, the author writes, and I quote "The big multinationals have understood very well that China is 80 to 120 regional markets, all very different. Success in one city or province is no guarantee of success in other regions". This sentence made me realize that, today, if you want to set up a business in China, if you want to work with the Chinese, it's no longer enough to know "China", you have to know "the Chinese", because China is such a big country, with such a wide variety of inhabitants and workers, all different from one region to another.

So I built my own SWOT analysis, based on my research and our exchange with our Chinese correspondents.

SWOT TABLE OF CHINA'S BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

STRENGTHS

- 45,000 kilometers of freeways. China is now the world's second largest motorway network.

- 142 is the number of airports in China. This is set to rise to 220 by 2020.

- 3 of the world's 4 largest container ports are now in China.

- the world's leading supplier of finished goods and raw materials

- China is the leading destination for foreign investment

- abundant, relatively skilled and low-cost labor force

- a relatively stable political system that supports industrial development through infrastructure

WEAKNESSES

- lack of transparency and control of information, which is a real problem in this country

- 20 of the world's 30 most polluted cities are in China (90% of Chinese cities have polluted water tables, and more than a third are subject to acid rain). According to the International Energy Agency, China is set to overtake the United States as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by 2009.

- more or less protectionist attitude on the part of local authorities

- it's hard to succeed in China, because of the difficulty of deciphering and managing a business environment that is changing and radically different from our own.

OPPORTUNITIES

- In recent years, China has been seeking to shift its sourcing towards more complex products (industrial equipment, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, IT services).

- For

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