Into China: a Shanghai company to train and supply engineers (2003)

What transferred, and what did not

What Meitec tried to carry into China was neither plant nor product but the method itself — train engineers, then place them at the customer. Its strength in Japan holds only because training facilities, long employment and deep relationships with customers’ design departments all work together. In China, it appears, neither the mechanism for keeping trained engineers nor the commercial custom of accepting on-site staff came together as they had at home. Entering cautiously, through education and placement, was reasonable in design; but caution kept the scale small, and the venture spent more than a decade running losses.

The expansion nonetheless left something behind. It recorded inside the company, with figures attached, the fact that when a manufacturing customer goes abroad, the supplier of engineers cannot necessarily follow at the same speed. After the withdrawal, the Meitec group converged on a single-business structure in which engineering solutions accounts for more than 99% of revenue, and it now seeks growth in the number of engineers it employs at home, in their utilization rate, and in raising the price of their work. Go abroad, or dig deeper at home — the company’s answer to that choice was settled over sixteen years of retreat.