Under the impacts of the pandemic and regional conflicts, regional economies around the world have been confronted with disruptions to supply chains and inflation in 2022. Domestic contradictions have given rise to the call for "reverse globalization".
As a significant force for global economic prosperity and social governance,China's choice will be crucial: to firmly promote global collaboration and mutual benefit, or to be involved in the prisoner's dilemma of trade and tariff wars?
In our view, the global economy has increasingly become an inseparable whole, and this correction is because the international community needs some time to adapt to the new situation and rebuild the new order.
Guided by President Xi's "new development pattern with the domestic cycle as the main body and the domestic and international dual cycles promoting each other", EqualOcean actively builds a communication platform for business entities originating from China and with a global perspective, helping China's science and technology enterprises to develop Global Market. This was the first offline event after the quarantine , and only a few dozen people were invited for a closed-door exchange. Guests came from enterprises and professional institutions, including Chamlion Laser Technology, Insilico Medicine, LinkedIn, eRoad Human Resources Technology and IYIOU. They discussed the new concept and methodology of "global business collaboration and diverse team building" from different perspectives.
After the opening speech by the host of EqualOcean, three guests from Chamlion Laser Technology, Qun Zhang(Deputy GM of International Business), Wei Shi(Head of Human Resources), and Sheng Lu(Head of Overseas Technical Team), shared their views based on "Global Business Collaboration". The following content is extracted from the speech of Chamlion Laser Technology.
Qun Zhang, Deputy GM of International Business, Chamlion Laser Technology
Wei Shi, Head of Human Resources
Sheng Lu, Head of Overseas Technical Team
The complex technical know-how, high customization and heavy labor input characteristics of dental 3D printing give China an advantage in this industry. In previous years, China has developed rapidly in terms of products and technology, while the labor force and infrastructure conditions are also mature. On the basis of leading the industry in China, Chamlion Laser Technology naturally pursues China's advantages to go overseas.
The current geopolitical environment and the international economic and trade situation have brought many obstacles and uncertainties to the development of the international market for enterprises, but Chamlion Laser is still actively going out under the premise of putting national interests first and abiding by economic and trade rules, hoping to serve consumers around the world and creating convenience and value. Under the leadership of CEO Zhitao Wang, Chamlion Laser Technology has confronted risks, embraced openness, and established a global partner network.
In terms of team building, Chamlion Laser Technology is mindful of localization and willing to hire employees who are familiar with local markets and rules. In the process of overseas employee recruitment, they communicate with applicants from different cultural backgrounds and occupational habits with a learning attitude.
Chamlion Laser Technology is both a Nanjing company and a Chinese company, and will be more committed to becoming a global company in the future. As an export-oriented and fast-growing company, Chamlion Laser will not worry too much about the difficulties that arise due to cultural differences.
The company will learn, adapt, and reach out to each local market with humility, serving global consumers with the highest quality, most convenient and accessible products and even a complete set of solutions, and giving back to the community as well. By building a relationship of mutual trust and reciprocity with local communities, we will further build a positive image of Chinese companies.
Regarding ESG, Chamlion Laser Technology mentioned that there will be a series of community participation plans in the future, and will hold mouth cavity health public welfare activities for senior citizens in many communities. Meanwhile, Chamlion Laser actively participates in school-enterprise cooperation and contributes to the cultivation of outstanding young people.
Then, Andy Xie, global head of human resources from Insilico Medicine, gave a speech about "Team Building Under The International Perspective". The following content is extracted from his sharing.
Andy Xie, global head of human resources from Insilico Medicine
According to Goldman Sachs' forecast data on economic growth in 2022, the global economy is likely to move in an inverted T-shape.It will not rebound immediately after hitting the bottom, but will enter a short plateau period.
Under such economic trends, the biopharmaceutical industry is facing unprecedented financial pressure. For companies in the unlisted stage, the attitude of investment institutions is more cautious and careful. For companies preparing to raise funds through IPO, according to statistics in March 2022, the market value of Nasdaq-listed pharmaceutical companies has shrunk by more than 40%, and the prospects are also uncertain. In the global biopharmaceutical industry, there is likely to be intense competition in the global biopharmaceutical industry, with more aggressive M&A moves by industry giants.
In terms of innovation, innovation enabled by AI and machine learning will be further accelerated.On the industrial collaboration side, the importance of biotechnology in biopharmaceutical drug development and discovery will increase. On the market side, the global market for bio-pharmaceuticals is expected to reach 800 billion to trillion US dollars by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 7.1%. More importantly, AI-enabled new drug market in the Asia-Pacific region has a compound annual growth rate of even more than 40%. China's position in the global biopharmaceutical industry will rapidly increase and occupy an increasingly important ecological niche.
Under the new trend, if biopharmaceutical companies want to move towards the goal of "Big Pharma", they must carry out international layout in the three directions, which are R&D collaboration, capital market and target market. In the process of internationalization, biomedical R&D is highly dependent on talents. Law and commercialization requirements in different countries and regions require companies to pay attention to local talents. The development of international cooperation is based on the layout of international talents.
Back to Insilico Medicine, this is a company driven by artificial intelligence and drug research and development. It was established in the United States in 2014 and currently has branch centers in seven countries in Europe, America, Asia and the Middle East.The 300 global members are consisted by more than 100 AI developers and 100 drug development scientists.The three AI platforms independently developed by Insilico Medicine have changed the drug development process, shortened the time required for research and development, and greatly reduced the cost of research and development.
According to the data comparison, it only takes 18 months to go from disease hypothesis to preclinical research with the help of Insilico intelligent AI platform. And it only costs 3 million US dollars. Under normal circumstances, the corresponding time is more than 4 years, and the cost ranges from tens of millions of dollars to hundreds of millions.
For AI platforms, data is as important as algorithms. Insilicon's self-developed AI platform has generated more than 30 algorithm models, published more than 160 peer-reviewed papers, possessed more than 70 patents and patent applications. The platform tracks data related to research projects that are funded by more than $2 trillion, aggregated and cleaned for AI use.
Our R&D team and results have already had initial results. There is currently an investigational program in clinical phase I, which is a milestone because it is the world's first AI-discovered and designed drug and the first AI drug to enter the clinic in China. There are also seven preclinical candidate compounds covering cancer and fibrosis.
In terms of collaboration, Insilico has more than 30 top partner institutions around the world, including multinational pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Merck, TEVA, and Sumitomo Pharmaceuticals, as well as leading Chinese pharmaceutical companies such as Huadong Medicine and Fosun Pharma. It took a record 30 days from the cooperation with Fosun Pharma to reaching the first R&D milestone.
Driven by artificial intelligence and drug R&D, Dr. Feng Ren, co-CEO of Insilico Medicine, proposed that the demand for talents should "break the circle, break the situation, and break the boundary". The drug research and development team is composed of members with backgrounds in biology, chemistry, medicine and other disciplines. Different disciplines represent different circles and the premise of healthy team collaboration is to break the circle. There is a clear boundary between AI and DD (Drug Discovery), and human resources workers must build connections between algorithm developers and drug developers. "Breaking the boundary" means that Insilicon hopes to break the "small molecule" boundary through AI-enabled drug research and development, and make breakthroughs in the field of small molecule pharmaceutical research and development.
Based on the rapid development of the track, Insilicon's values emphasize "relentless innovative". We believe that if innovation is stopped, it will be surpassed. Based on the role of a pharmaceutical company, Insilico adheres to "patient first" and strictly adheres to the "transparency and integrity" standard. Corresponding to this value, Insilicon needs talents who are "self-driven", able to "keep asking, keep learning" and have "ownership mentality".
In addition to the regular talent recruitment channels, Insilico has a championship event that the company is proud of - the Hackthon. Rather than "hackers", it's more like geeks with a passion for technology.By hosting the Hackthon in the target region, Insilicon was able to discover and connect with many AI and machine learning talents from different countries. This event has also helped Insilicon build awareness and reputation in the university community. For outstanding talents, Insilicon believes that in addition to material incentives, it is also important to provide "sense of achievement" and "opportunities for learning and growth".
In order to meet the high level of talent recruitment needs, an attractive international employer brand image is needed. Growth in corporate strength is the foundation, while public events, social networks and words from mouths are all effective channels.
Switching perspectives, Jeff Zhang, Sales Director of Linkedin China, shared "A global talent supply chain based on data insights" from the perspective of a professional organization. The following content is extracted from his presentation.
Jeff Zhang, Sales Director of LinkedIn China
Technology iterations and big data are reshaping the industry chain, which in turn is placing new demands on people and organizations. This whole series of changes is defined as "digital transformation".
The underlying logic of data analytics is the diversity of data. LinkedIn has 850 million registered members, over 59 million registered companies, and 128,000 registered schools worldwide, as well as 14 million jobs information and 39,000 skills tags. Based on rich profile data, dynamic behavioral data and forward-looking trend data, LinkedIn has the ability to provide data insights that can guide companies to create more scientific talent layout.
What is the value of digitization for HR management in an organization? For top-level decision makers, high-quality talent data and insights directly affect the development of talent strategy, the attractiveness of core key talent and the creation of brand influence; for hiring departments, it is an important tool to build winning teams and improve team dedication and satisfaction. For HR departments, efficient digital talent management tools can improve their own and the organization's digital thinking and capabilities. It is the core of digital transformation of the organization.
The digital competition will ultimately come down to the competition of digital talent. With a huge amount of data as the cornerstone, LinkedIn has launched the "Global Digital Talent Development Annual Report" in cooperation with many top organizations around the world, which defines "digital talent" comprehensively through 24 hard skills and 8 soft skills tags.
In the process of digital transformation, LinkedIn recommends companies to improve organizational competitiveness in three dimensions: "talent supply chain, organizational dynamics and digital foundation."
Creating an efficient and high-quality talent supply chain can start from three aspects: "talent planning, talent attraction and talent development and retention." The talent attraction path can be divided into "Buy, Borrow, and Build". In addition to establishing a regular talent acquisition mechanism, companies need to set up internal talent flow programs and talent development systems.
To ensure organizational dynamism, Chinese companies need to overcome culture clashes, build an employer brand with international appeal, promote corporate values and culture, emphasize diversity, equality and inclusion, emphasize innovation, and focus on learning and development.
The core is to create a forward-looking talent data analysis system to better understand the trends based on talent market and company talent change data, and more effectively carry out strategic layout including talent planning, talent analysis, and talent attraction strategy. The HR department uses big data insights to optimize recruitment strategies and set recruitment targets with hiring managers.
Based on the insight of global talent and the experience of working with tens of millions of companies, Linkedin launched the "Magellan Plan" for overseas recruitment to provide integrated HR solutions for global companies. From forward-looking insights and precise targeting to building a superior brand image overseas, it empowers and enhances the teams of companies based on LinkedIn's global resources and efficient operational capabilities.
In terms of talent pool, LinkedIn has more than 720,000 global 2023 Chinese fresh graduates, and has long-term in-depth partnerships with top-tier institutions such as Stanford, MIT and Harvard.
After the sharing session, eRoad's Product Director of HR Technology PaySmart team, Bo Yan, joined the guest panel for a light-hearted and insightful discussion on the questions raised by the audience. The following content is extracted from the roundtable discussion.
Bo Yan, eRoad's Product Director of HR Technology PaySmart team
Q: In the last two years, has your company or the companies you've spoken to felt a change in the global business environment? What adjustments have companies made?
Chamlion Laser Technology: Business environment does appear to have some uncertainty and even negative factors, but Chamlion obtains a lot of valuable input and feedback by actively operating a network of partners around the world, communicating deeply with overseas talents. Domestic business departments and human resources departments have launched close cooperation in talent recruitment, and continue to polish an accurate talent portrait; at the same time, organizational management has been digitally upgraded, and collaboration among departments is smooth.
Insilico Medicine: In the capital market, the biopharmaceutical industry experienced from the glory in 2021 to the trough in 2022.In this condition, Insilico Medicine was affected to a certain extent. However, no major changes have occurred in terms of international collaboration, and top pharmaceutical companies have always taken a more cautious, results-first approach when they come to partner selection. In terms of innovation and technology, Chinese enterprises have stronger self-research and innovation motivation, and the pursuit of differentiation is more extreme.
LinkedIn: During the economic downturn, head companies are instead investing more in technology innovation and process optimization, and chasing international talent more aggressively. At the same time, in this environment, the price of good talent is relatively low, which is good for enterprises.
In addition, companies that have globalized before are accelerating the pace of globalization, spreading the risk on the one hand, and taking advantage of the information gap to lay out ahead and establish advantages on the other hand.
In addition to actively communicating with "active job seekers", companies should pay more attention to "passive job seekers", especially in economically active regions like China and NA. The latter may bring higher long-term value to innovative companies at a more reasonable cost.
eRoad Human Resources Technology: Companies and investors are placing unprecedented emphasis on healthy positive cash flow. For HR departments, the dimensions and criteria for data insight and analysis of HR cost structures based on income statement targets to guide the improvement of people efficiency are also changing.
Q: What is the biggest difference between conducting business collaboration and building teams in a global context compared to domestic or single markets?
Chamlion Laser Technology: The process of going from domestic to global has seen a fundamental change in the positioning and demand for talent, as the complexity of talent acquisition and teamwork has increased significantly.
Silico Medicine: Our company is born with a global perspective. From my role as head of global HR, the main challenges are these: we need to set differentiated HR goals and strategies in each region, for example, non-compete clause requirements vary from state to state and city to city in the US, and just preparing legal documents related to recruitment involves a huge amount of work; recruiting in different regions requires attention and adaptation to the local cultural and political environment, such as gender equality, personal privacy and other related issues are highly sensitive in some regions. In some regions, issues related to gender equality, personal privacy, etc. are highly sensitive topics.
Besides, overcoming time differences is also a major issue when it comes to teamwork in different regions, and different countries use different collaboration platforms and communication tools as well.
How to ensure that people with different cultural backgrounds and professional habits can work together efficiently? First of all, at the recruitment phase, we need to attract people with common values and goals and create an atmosphere of mutual tolerance and adaptation in the team.
LinkedIn: In the past, companies with a global presence could only rely on expatriate Chinese employees for global business development, but since 2020, due to the pandemic and other factors,enterprises have to pay more attention to localized operations and localized talents.
eRoad Human Resources Technology: When I used to work at IBM we had a joke that when people saw certain people they knew they were from a certain company. When Chinese companies go global, they must pay attention to the diversification of values and ideas and the shaping of behavior patterns.
Q: As core managers or HR experts, what do you think of the incidents where Chinese "airborne" executives from companies such as Shopee and TikTok had disagreements with local employees?
Chamlion Laser Technology: This kind of thing does not lie in which party is right or wrong. In the spirit of reaching the purpose of cooperation, Chinese companies need to form a mentality that matches the bigger picture. A talent attrition rate higher than 15% is a warning signal to enterprises. From the most basic welfare benefits, to performance interviews, communication frequency, management style, corporate culture building and other aspects should be paid attention to. Traditional Chinese culture promotes "benevolence and virtue", a value that can be beneficial to corporate management and cohesion building.
Chamlion Laser's management always regards every employee as its own "customer", and treats employees with a service mentality and manner, which naturally gains employees' emotional feedback and full devotion to work.
Silico Medicine: We need to acknowledge the importance foreign companies place on promoting cross-cultural communication, and many of them even arrange to take cross-cultural communication courses instead of assigning new employees to work first on their first day of employment. For Chinese companies aspiring to become a global enterprise, it is important to realize that employees in a cross-cultural context have different ways of thinking. The term "situational leadership" is often used in human resources, and we also need "situational management" to adapt and respect the systems and cultures of different countries or regions. At the same time, in order to ensure the efficiency and output of the team as a whole, it is possible to be guided by "results and goals" rather than by a rigid system.
LinkedIn: We have cultural confidence and the largest middle class group and consumer market in the world, thanks to the rapid development over the decades of reform and opening up. On a cultural level, we are used to grand unification. And when we try to go global, we will find that other regions have very different cultures from ours, and they are different from each other.
On an organizational level, managers can try to adopt a more open-source mentality, as Ray Hoffman says in his book "The Alliance","focus more on how to promote mutual value creation between the organization and the individuals in it in the moment". On the other hand, all diversity has to be put into rules, from rigid behavioral requirements to a consensus throughout the organization. For example, multinational companies have rigid targets regarding the percentage of employees of race and gender, and in the process of implementation, employees will gradually develop a common mindset regarding racial and gender equality.
eRoad Human Resources Technology: Foreign companies used to send young foreigners to China to lead a group of local senior workplace professionals. Now the situation is reversed, but in either case, disagreements and conflicts are likely to occur. On the basis of strong professional strengths, we need to note the increasing importance of soft strengths and soft skills. How to overcome differences, carry out efficient and friendly communication, and then create a good image of Chinese people in the world are significant questions that companies need to think about.
Finally, Guocheng Miao, director of IYiou and general manager of Shanghai Branch, made an interpretation and prospect of the trend based on the research results of Yiou. The following content is extracted from Yiou sharing.
At this point in time in September 2022, the debate on "globalization" and "reverse globalization" is once again on the table. In the past, developed countries sold some of their uneaten pie to emerging countries, so they promoted globalization. Now the appetite of developed countries has been enlarged, and the pie is not enough for everyone to eat. So they want to snatch back the sold pie. As an important member of the emerging countries, China needs to jump outside the circle of "zero-sum game" and take the initiative to make the pie bigger together, so that each country can get a bigger share.
Over the years, the government has been actively promoting regional reciprocity and global collaboration, which is implemented at the micro level by enterprises. Chinese companies are now facing more difficulties in developing global business, as the international political and economic landscape is on the eve of profound changes. Companies that seize the changes in trends and plan ahead for the next phase may become the long-term leaders in the "new globalization" era. From the perspective of an industry observer, we share two trends that we believe will have a key impact.
First, the global supply chain system will be reshuffled.
In the last era of globalization, the division of labor and layout of global supply chains were mainly based on efficiency considerations, with traditional industrial countries spilling over to emerging countries to make full use of incoming resources such as inexpensive land, cheap labor and raw materials. This is the practice of the theory of the classical school of economics.
Covid-19 pandemic, as well as this year's Russia-Ukraine war, have directly or indirectly caused serious impact on the balance of the old-era global supply chain. The economically and technologically developed countries represented by the U.S, Germany and Japan have given more consideration to their own autonomy and security in the global supply chain. The typical event is the Chip and Technology Act, which was fast-tracked in August to attract high-end manufacturing back through tens of billions of dollars of high subsidies and weaken China's influence in the global supply chain system.
What can Chinese companies do at this critical time in the restructuring of the system?
We believe that the first step is to shift the mindset from "trade" to "collaboration". A trade mentality that sees regions outside of China only as "markets" and "customers" will make companies vulnerable to cyclical fluctuations, and the "getting rich in silence" mentality won't work. Under the guidance of the "collaboration" mentality, enterprises will be more proactive in establishing deep links with local resources to form a distributed benefit-sharing and risk-sharing mechanism. Based on the supply chain, we can open up channel cooperation, community participation and even political and business relations and brand building in order to get feet on the ground in different regions.
For example, if a company only sells its products to distributors in a certain country, it will suffer serious losses if local tariffs are imposed, access is restricted, or freight is interrupted due to force majeure. But if the company has laid out part of the local supply chain facilities, paid taxes to the local government, and hired local employees, then the above risks will be significantly reduced.
Of course, the supply chain layout we mention here should be within the cost control, but this cost is not only the cost of construction and operation, but the risk control and brand goodwill should be taken into account as the long-term return.
Admittedly, we see that the infrastructure of emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa is not as perfect as that of China, but the infrastructure of China at the early stage of reform and opening up is also imperfect, and the nation risk is not low for Western companies. However, the investments made by Western companies that entered China early in the process of participating in the construction of the market reaped dividends of tens or even hundreds of times in the following decades. The mismatch between demand and status quo in emerging markets is also an opportunity for Chinese companies.
Therefore, we believe that deep global business collaboration with a long-term investment mindset, based on in-depth market research, and with predictable cost-to-reward ratios is the grip that Chinese companies need to build an advantage in the next era of global competition.
Another trend we see is that digitalization and intelligence will reshape all industries, and with the advantages of digitalization and intelligence, Chinese companies have the opportunity to penetrate upwards and spill over downwards at the same time.
The shocks in the VC space since this year have made us realize that China has entered the era of stock economy, and unless the underlying technology is iterated, there will be no more universal leap forward growth. Under this premise, the concept of "cost reduction and efficiency enhancement" has been reassigned a heavier meaning.
In the past two years, when SaaS track investment was hot, everyone always talked about "cost reduction and efficiency enhancement". However, when we look at SaaS companies this year, most of them have not survived until they are listed, and even those that are listed are still languishing. Many people have lost confidence in SaaS and even enterprise services. But is that really the case?
August U.S. earnings season, a host of enterprise services giants Microsoft, SAP, Unity and cloud vendors Amazon, IBM and other quarterly reports show that they rely on firm digital services revenue to achieve more than expected results. Compared with specific products or brands, the industry's common infrastructure is more difficult to be replaced. Another statistical data of U.S. VC investment in each month from March to August, the digital segment accounts for more than 1/3 of the overall in terms of number and amount. Why can the U.S. digitalization develop so well? The high cost of labor is forcing the whole industry to move.
At present, Chinese enterprises are facing the problems of scattered personnel, complex market and lack of collaboration to expand their business and build teams globally. Only through a high degree of digitization of operations and management can we form institutionalized teams that can adapt to changing situations and truly help companies achieve stable expansion while increasing efficiency.
In the process of going global, Chinese enterprises have the underlying advantages of digitalization. First of all, we have experienced the in-depth development of the digital economy during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, and the infrastructure has been improved, and society has generally formed the cognition and habit of using digital tools. By iterating the tools based on past trial and error, and making people and tools fit together better, we can downscale in emerging markets and enjoy the dividends in mature markets where there is still a gap in labor costs.
Secondly, the country's vigorous encouragement and support for China's digital economy has already yielded obvious results. In the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Digital Economy" issued by the State Council at the beginning of the year, the State Council affirmed the achievements of China's digital economy platform enterprises in the last stage of going abroad and stressed the need to continue to deepen international cooperation in the digital economy.
Based on the digitization of organization and collaboration, and constantly improving the intelligence of products and services, this is the underlying logic that will enable Chinese enterprises to capture the market and expand their scale in the future.
China is already a leader in many fields of intelligent transformation, such as industrial robots, smart homes , intelligent customer service, image recognition and so on. For B to B enterprises, in order to realize intelligence, they can learn from the emphasis on "user experience" in the mobile Internet era. Based on deep insight into customer needs and usage scenarios, as well as efficient transformation of data and technology, enterprises should apply integrated solutions based on core products to form differentiated barriers.
In the trend of digitization and intelligence, the importance of attracting and managing global talents is becoming more and more prominent. This point has been shared by other professionals, so I won't do it here.
At the end of my sharing, I would like to give my business friends a sentence: Most of a person's achievements are built in poverty and hardship, while misfortunes are often born from fun and enjoyment.
With the theme of "Global Entrepreneurship, World Win-Win", the 2022 EqualOcean Summit for Globalization (ESG2022), organized by EqualOcean Globalization Think Tank and co-organized by IYIOU, will be held on November 8 at the 5th during China International Import Expo (CIE). Th ESG will be held on November 8 at Renaissance Shanghai Zhongshan Park Hotel. For information about ESG, please email lena@equalocean.com or call: 19921488250.