Chinese companies ‘going global’ should learn from Japan’s mistakes, academic says

A marketing analyst has said Chinese firms taking their business overseas can learn from their Japanese counterparts – in how not to do it

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As Chinese businesses move overseas, an academic has suggested they look to Japan as an example of what not to do. Photo: Handout

Ji Siqiin Dalian, Liaoning province

Published: 9:30pm, 28 Jun 2024Updated: 10:40am, 2 Jul 2024

As more Chinese companies expand their overseas business – staying out of harm’s way as trade frictions with the West intensify – they can learn a lesson from their Japanese predecessors who failed in their own attempts at globalisation, a prominent academic said.

“China and Japan are very different. But I think the Chinese can learn a lot from Japan’s mistakes,” said Dominique Turpin, professor of marketing at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai.

“Leading Japanese companies have missed their globalisation, because they lacked the global mindset,” said Turpin, also the school’s European president, in an interview at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions – also known as Summer Davos – in Dalian this week.

Current tensions, centred on the new energy trade between China and the United States as well as the European Union – both of which have announced tariff hikes on Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs) – are reminiscent of the hostility which greeted exports of Japanese cars in the 1980s, said Turpin, a Japan expert who previously served as dean and president of Switzerland’s International Institute for Management Development.

The Western world has underestimated the capacity of the Chinese to innovate, Turpin said, and when that innovation is coupled with the country’s economies of scale, the cost of production per unit is likely to be low no matter how heavily an industry is subsidised – a focal point of EU and US objections to China’s role in the EV market.

If you want to globalise, you need to trust the locals

Dominique Turpin

These trade barriers are meant to push Chinese companies to invest, he said, creating rather than destroying jobs in the bloc.