This is China! BLOG

Pilipinos in the Pipeline

A couple weeks ago while in Hangzhou I had an enlightening conversation with the British manager of a business process outsourcing company based in Hangzhou. The company has been supporting the back office operations of Western financial services companies for the past five years. They were just now looking to break into the growing financial services industry in China itself, by focusing more sales attention on Shanghai, specifically.

I asked the fellow – we’ll call him George – if his company did any call center work. Indeed, his company did, he answered. Of course, my follow-up question had to be: are you able to find enough Chinese staff to support the service? “No,” he answered with a laugh, and told me some of his company’s experiences.

As been discussed ad nauseum about the development of China’s BPO industry, the English-speaking ability of Chinese is years – nye, generations – behind India’s. It will be at least twenty years before English is as readily spoken or heard in China as in India.

I wittily told George that I had recently written a blog post a few weeks before in which I foresaw the day when Chinese BPO companies would be “in-sourcing” Pilipino (Filipino) workers to work their call centers. Many Pilipinos through their exposure to American culture speak English quite well. Why not, I suggested, import them into China to deal with clients in America and in the UK the same way call centers in the Philippines already is.

“We are already doing that,” he said proudly.

“You’re kidding?” was my incisive response. I had to admit I was impressed.

“Nope,” he grinned. Clearly he was delighted someone could appreciate the cleverness of his thinking.

The Chinese government, though, was not as impressed as I seemed to be, George told me. “They made it very difficult to bring in my first dozen people. They kept asking, ‘What can these people do that Chinese cannot do?’

“’Speak English,’ I would tell them. Now I’ve got a couple dozen Philippine staff, but it’s really not easy to get them in.”

“How are they to work with?”

George told me, “They’re very easy to work with. They do a good job. And they manage shift work much better than the Chinese.” The Chinese, he explained, have more of a problem with changing their sleep patterns than the Pilipinos. “The Chinese complain they’re always hungry by 3am. They just complain a lot more than the Pilipinos”

After all: the Chinese economy is still developing apace and opportunities still abound for young Chinese professionals in the Yangtze River Delta, the base of a great deal of China’s burgeoning services sector. At the end of the day, it just may be the Pilipinos who are hungrier for work.