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THE appointment of India-born Satya Nadella as Microsoft’s chief executive has caused a stir in China, where people are questioning why Indians are getting top jobs in the US.
Language and familiarity with Western culture are the obvious reasons chief executives such as Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo, Anshu Jain of Deutsche Bank and MasterCard’s Ajay Banga have succeeded in the West.
But headhunters also say Indians are more willing to move than Chinese, who see more opportunity and good pay at home.
Salaries for management roles at the director level in China are already $US131,000 ($142,000) a year, almost the same as in Japan, and four times as much as in India, where executives at that level earn $US35,000 on average.
Chinese pay is just one-fifth lower than the average in the US, according to a survey of technol*ogy companies by Aon Hewitt, a consulting company.
While India remains a tough place to live, China has become more comfortable in recent years, ranking as the No 1 country for expatriates, in an HSBC survey. Even Chinese executives who move away to escape pollution and a slowing economy are likelier to land in Hong Kong or Singapore than in Southeast Asia or Latin America.
“How do you get a Chinese to move to Brazil in a developmental sequence?’’ said Emmanuel Hem*merle, an adviser to Korn Ferry, an executive search firm.
“That’s a big challenge. China is such a high-growth market. Everyone sees that’s where the opportunity is.”
China suffers from a shortage of top talent, despite its pool of graduates, with 7.3 million more expected this year.
Consulting firm McKinsey & Co suggests fewer than 10 per cent of Chinese job candidates on average would be suitable for work in a foreign company because of their poor command of English and an education system that focuses on theory rather than practical skills.
Western companies aren’t always the employer of choice in China. State-owned enterprises and private companies are bidding for homegrown talent. With so much attention lavished on the most promising executives in China, many feel their opportunities are greater at home than abroad.
In some cases, multinationals want to keep their best Chinese executives inside China because the market is so important to them. However, that could hurt the careers of those executives because they become known as China specialists and are seen as less adaptable to other markets.
In the consumer-goods industry executives in China can receive substantially higher pay than their counterparts in the US. Chinese executives who moved abroad sometimes received smaller raises and were promoted less rapidly.
In other cases, firms that try to send Chinese executives abroad often feel a push-back.
Charles Wu, a 36-year veter*an at IBM who has worked in the US and China, has seen a lot of Chinese employees go on international assignments and come back in a year or two. “They tell me China is developing quickly and they don’t want to be out of touch,” Mr Wu said.
But there are downsides to being too attached to China. The risk is that they are overtaken in their careers by the next wave of Chinese managers, many of whom have better language skills and a broader world view.
Chinese execs who choose to work for domestic companies to avoid foreign postings could also be surprised. Increasingly, large Chinese private enter*prises require multiple assignments outside China for executives to move up the ranks.
