China’s Numbers Don’t Add Up
Chinese corruption and bureaucracy remain challenges for foreign businesspeople.
September 3, 2013
1. Foreign businesspeople tend to arrive in China animated by dreams featuring long multiplication.
2. They envisage their usual sales in units multiplied by the extra millions of customers and the burgeoning spending power of China’s growing middle class.
3. These foreigners often leave humbled by long division. Dreamt-of profits end up being sliced and diced — by unforeseen regulations, fees & murky “transaction costs.”
4. Anticipated new profits instead disappear into the official and unofficial bureaucracy China still has despite other modernizations.
From China’s blurred line between bribery and bureaucracy by James Kynge (Financial Times)
Takeaways
Dreamt-of China profits end up being sliced and diced by unforeseen regulations, fees & murky “transaction costs.”
