2024年5月5日发(作者：)

A pocket guide to doing

business in China

OCTOBER 2014

Gordon Orr

McKinsey director Gordon Orr goes behind the trends

shaping the world’s second-largest economy to explain what

companies must do to operate effectively.

China,

a $10 trillion economy growing at 7 percent annually, is a never-before-seen force

reshaping our global economy. Over the past 30 years, the Chinese government has at times

opened the door wide for foreign companies to participate in its domestic economic growth. At

other times, it has kept the door firmly closed. While some global leaders, such as automotive

original-equipment manufacturers, have turned China into their single largest source of profits,

others, especially in the service sectors, have been challenged to capture a meaningful share of

revenue or profits.

This article summarizes some of the trends shaping the next phase of China’s economic growth,

which industries might benefit the most, and what could potentially go wrong. It also lays out what

I believe it takes to build a successful, large-scale, and profitable business in China today as a

foreign company.

Trends shaping growth and creating new opportunities in China

As the contribution of net exports and real estate to economic growth diminishes, the focus on

infrastructure and domestic consumption—as traditional and new sources of growth for the

economy, respectively—rises. Whether or not the current growth of the Chinese economy is

sustainable depends on the evolution of several trends.

Government policy continues to be the critical shaping force. As the ministimulus delivered in the

second quarter of 2014 demonstrates, the government still possesses levers to push GDP growth

rates up and down quite rapidly. In other ongoing government initiatives, the “marketization” of

prices for electricity, water, land, and capital is having a major impact on the behavior of business,

leading to a new focus on productivity, even within state-owned enterprises. Progress in bringing

more private capital into state-owned enterprises is slow at the national level, with few scale

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examples, such as the $30 billion partial privatization of Sinopec’s gas stations under way. At the

city level, much more momentum is building, with local governments selling out of noncore

activities such as hotels and many manufacturing businesses. The anticorruption campaign

continues aggressively throughout state-owned enterprises, and government has itself become a

material brake on growth. Officials and executives are simply unwilling to make decisions that

could possibly be held against them later. President Xi has pursued anticorruption as a theme for

more than a decade; he is not going to back off.

The Chinese middle class—the people who are buying new homes, who today are buying 18 million

cars a year (delivering a third of the global auto industry’s profits), and who are starting to spend

more on services—are critical. Only if they remain confident in their personal economic future

will they continue to increase their spending and become a larger driver of economic growth. By

2022, more than 50 percent of urban households should be in the middle class (in current US

dollars, that means an annual household income of $20,000 to $40,000), an increase of more

than 100 million households over the coming decade.

China is now more than 50 percent urban, but 10 million to 15 million people a year will still be

moving to cities from the countryside. Rural migrants already in the cities need to be better

integrated. City governments need to make their cities more livable, more efficient, and better able

to integrate their migrants. “Smart cities” is a clichéd term, but China’s cities need everything

from more efficient mass transit to better water usage. Investment to deliver this will be massive,

indicating how the construction of China’s infrastructure is not yet complete.

Many businesses are coming under a new level of cost and margin pressure. Margins of

industrial state-owned enterprises have fallen by a third over the past four years. Often the

industries they compete in, from steel production to telecom-network equipment, are simply

growing much more slowly. By the standards of China over the past 30 years, state-owned

enterprises have become mature industries. This leads to three outcomes: initiatives on

productivity, diversification, and globalization. The latter two are more often conducted on the

basis that prior success in one industry in China will automatically lead to success in the next

industry and country.

Multinationals selling to Chinese consumers often continue to perform extremely well, using their

skills in consumer insights, branding, and pricing to differentiate from local companies that,

while large, are still developing world-class functional capabilities. Multinationals selling to

government, at the other end of the spectrum, find market access much more challenging.