SMEs in China tread carefully

Last night I had a quick chat with Ross Horley, executive director of listed medical training and technology company Medic Vision.

Medic Vision has a substantial training business in China, and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese Medical Doctors Association in December 2008 to provide Western clinical and surgical skills training throughout the nation.

Horley has extensive experience working in China and has also worked in Indonesia and Malaysia at times when political tensions between those countries and Australia have been high.

He says there is no doubt that small companies working in China will feel some fallout from this latest incident.

“Smaller companies do feel the backlash of either political or large corporate activities which could be seen to be antagonistic.”

While the Chinese medical staff that Medic Vision works with is unlikely to have heard much about the Hu incident, the government officials the company deals with are likely to be well aware of the controversy.

“They all know and they all have an opinion.”

If asked for a comment on the incident, Horley will be playing a straight bat.

“You need to run the neutral line. We’ll say ‘these things happen, this really has no bearing on our company.’”

Horley, who has worked in China for eight years, admits it is a difficult place to do business at the best of times. But he says suggestions that foreign business people have their phones tapped and email monitored need to be taken with a pinch of salt and points out cases of industrial espionage have occurred in Western countries too.

“You just need to be observant. It’s something that you need to have in the back of your mind, whether it’s in Ballarat or Beijing.”

Horley’s best advice? A low political profile is almost always the best way to go when working in foreign companies.

In China, that advice has rarely been more important.