Railway stations that are as appealing and efficient as Terminal 3 at Changi. Silent cities like Shanghai, where the hum of electric vehicles has largely replaced traffic noise. Fully articulated humanoid robots walking the streets, or smaller versions delivering food to your hotel room. Face recognition is used to open hotel room doors, and people smile at ATMs so they can withdraw cash.
But, and it’s an important but, from a business perspective, this doesn’t stop the visitor telling his Chinese partners that “back home, we do it differently”. It’s not a problem limited to the first operational meeting. The attitude can persist for a long period until finally, as a result, the business co-operation collapses.
This is not something that is restricted to smaller businesses. It is a problem that can bedevil even the largest of international corporations. Many would argue that they are the worst offenders because their size means they carry a corporate arrogance with them, and in many cases, they have been successful in imposing their practices in other countries where they operate.
Consider eBay as an example. Confident in its online selling model, it entered the China market. Like the wicked sisters in Cinderella, they tried to make the shoe fit. They insisted that they had the solution because “back home, we did it differently”.
See also: DeepSeek plans to double staff across all departments
In China, eBay was a high-profile business failure, and it blamed unfair and restrictive competitive practices. While the reasons for failure are complex, several key factors stand out and cannot be ignored.
The company misread the Chinese market on several levels. It charged for site listings while its Chinese competitors did not. eBay also placed its servers outside China and, as a result, significantly slowed transaction times. In a competitive bidding environment, such delays can be important. eBay did not offer a way for buyers and sellers to chat online, whereas its competitors did. Chinese buyers like to talk with sellers and haggle over quality and price. eBay’s Chinese competitors understood this and included online chat as a value-added service.
China breaks business models
Baidu, Google’s Chinese competitor, succeeded because it offered services Google did not. Although Google made much of censorship issues, these concerns appealed more to Western perceptions than to most potential users in China. Chinese users preferred a service built in their own language and fully integrated with Chinese websites. Google ultimately failed to provide the services many users wanted.
See also: China's central bank plans overnight reverse repo in next stage of policy shift
“Back home”, eBay and Google did it differently — but “home” was not China. Decades ago, a Singapore retail property developer replicated the model of clustering retail and F&B outlets around MRT stations. If it worked in Tanjong Pagar, City Hall, Raffles Place and Bugis, then it should work in Beijing too, where three office towers were built above a major subway interchange.
The concept worked “back home”, but “home” was not China, and this showed up in the share price. That same assumption — that success “back home” would translate elsewhere — showed up in more than one context. I approached my first speaking engagements in China with confidence. The invitations were extended on the back of my well-established international reputation. Feedback from organisers and attendees told me that I was very good at what I was doing, both in content and presentation style. My services were in high demand, so I assumed that these “back home” skills would carry directly into the China market.
They didn’t. The first round of conference speaking engagements was not a failure, but nor were they a success. My translators were good, so the lack of success was because of the language.
I had a choice. I could either conclude that the way I did things back home was the best and only way to do conference events, or I could adjust my presentation methods.
I chose the second option and went out of my wsay to understand what the China audience expected, what they detested, and what they appreciated. The content remained the same, but the way it was presented was very different to the way I worked in Singapore, Malaysia or Australia.
I made a conscious decision not to use the phrase “back home, we do it differently”. More challenging is to put aside some of your experience and listen so you can adapt to the business environment that looks similar but operates under different cultural rules.
When you are working in China, you are definitely “Not in Kansas anymore.”
Daryl Guppy is an international financial technical analysis expert. He has provided weekly Shanghai Index analysis for Mainland Chinese media for two decades. Guppy appears regularly on CNBC Asia and is known as “The Chart Man”. He is a former national board member of the Australia-China Business Council. The writer owns Chinese stock and index ETFs.
