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Japanese Companies Are Eager to Hire "Competitive"
Chinese Grads
2010/11/24
An article of The Asahi Shinbun Company, one of major newspapers in Japan, reported
it with the headline. Here is the rough summary:
Japanese companies seriously started to focus on college grads in China for hiring.
"I felt that I struck a gold mine. Honestly, I was shocked.", said Mr. Uchida, a
partner of BCG after interviews over 2 days.
He said, "Many of Japanese young people are herbivorous type. Those who have competitive
mind are getting less. In China, there are a lot of competitive students who are the type
of human resources we love."
Some people say that Chinese young people tend to quit soon and this is a risk. However,
he said that there are many herbivorous Japanese elites who quit within a couple of years,
as well.
A person in charge of human resources in a leading toy manufacture in Japan, TAKARA TOMY,
said, "Chinese students are excellent. They have clear career plans and strong motivation.
If we hire more Chinese students, we will hire less Japanese students accordingly."
Some Japanese companies which are going to expand their business in China said, "There
is a limit in sales activities by Japanese. We want excellent Chinese to help us to expand
a market."
Mr. Uchida said, "By employing competent foreigners, Japanese people must change their
perspectives and should start to work with a sense of crisis."
I am not sure whether or not those Japanese companies' strategy can get paid in the long
term because there was a bad incident where tons of data related to drawing for design (around
160.000 cases reportedly) owned by a well-known supplier of automotive technologies and components,
DENSO, were stolen by a Chinese engineer who worked for DENSO.
I personally think that risks may be higher than benefits to whole Japan in the long term.
However, although Japanese companies say many reasons for their purpose to increase Chinese
students rather than Japanese, their purpose should be simple actually. Just two reasons.
First, Japanese companies want to reduce the cost of Japanese workers. Second, they aim at
China market.
Under this circumstance, it seems that employment rate in Japan will go worse year by year
for a while.
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