Crossing boundaries: tough for all tech companies - Jeffrey Towson

Jeffrey Towson

Foreign tech firms have a tough time entering the Chinese market, but Chinese tech companies going global have an equally hard time, despite increased financial firepower. Peking University business professor Jeffrey Towson discusses the international development of the tech market at CGTN. Even his mum in California knows now Alibaba's Jack Ma, but it does not mean she uses his products, yet.

CGTN:

A large population used to drive China’s economy through cheap labor. But it is now benefiting the country’s technology in a particular way. 

Jeffrey Towson, professor of investment from Peking University, believes China’s tech giants can beat US companies “fair and square,” both within the domestic market and abroad. 

Supporting his view is the large scale of native tech companies and consumers.

“When a company like Huawei, which has 170,000 employees and 70,000 of them are in R&D, that’s bigger than Cisco (a world leading IT company based in the US), which has 70,000 for the whole company, that’s incredibly difficult to compete with,” Towson said... 

New groups of labor and expertise have also helped China’s tech industry thrive.

“If we talk about gaming, we’d also be talking about artists, people coming from design schools and animation schools, of which there are a lot now. So there's population migration on top of government action – sometimes things just happen,” Towson said.

Let’s now argue against that opinion from The Economist – if the Chinese government drops censorship and restrictions on foreign tech companies, will they win?

More (including two videos) at CGTN.

Jeffrey Towson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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