China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park — untold story #3 ： Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Promotion to China in the aftermath of Asian Financial Crisis, the challenges and techniques developed from Singapore (Part I)
In Chinese, the word crisis “危机” is interpreted as both dangers and opportunities going hand-in-hand. How one views a crisis and how to act on the trend of the crisis became a very important lesson I had learnt from my days in Suzhou, especially when I was promoting foreign investments into the SIP.
Right after the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, I started my journey to join the team to market SIP to foreign companies from 1998. Many companies were reluctant to invest in any new projects; more so during this period in China, when it was still considered still not a lucrative market nor a market to export for most of the products in the world.
To market to China as a Singaporean would feel weird in today’s context, but in those days, China had not yet learnt how to promote any FDIs. However, thanks to my ability to speak Japanese and trained in Computer Science and Engineering, I was given the opportunity during the crisis a ticket to be relocated to Suzhou to market the Industrial Park to both Japanese companies as well as all the IT companies.
It would have been an easy task but not during a time when China was really not an attractive location for investors to look at. Worse, as it was just after the financial crisis, the interest level was mostly wait and see. So how did I even manage to pull in investments into SIP during those days ? I think it was both ignorance and enthusiasm, with a mindset of persistence that trained me to do so.
For many who did not know what cold calling meant, I used to send out hundreds of faxes to Japanese and IT companies from Singapore, sharing on what SIP was, and also to promote China as a whole as an emerging economy with intelligent and hardworking workers, coupled with rather inexpensive labor costs. And to follow up, I would cold call by just dialing in numbers to executives in Japan to see if they received my letters, representing the JV company that promoted and developed the Park. Like all my other colleagues, we were just like call centre operators, making thousands of phone calls, not to secure an investment but merely just to secure a meeting with the executives who were in charge of foreign businesses. In fact, the job made me change my personality, a relatively reserved person to a more outward spoken person too. I could not describe the jubilee that I enjoyed when I was told to be able to meet the executives personally and I would spend days preparing for what we called an IP (investment promotion) trip to meet them, and that was just the beginning of the consideration to invest in China. For many of my friends now looking at promoting FDIs from all over the world, the journey to start was not rosy, but I recalled also sharing with the executives not only the “hardware” of the park, but also the many “software” in terms of management style and infrastructure supported by Singapore, and turning the table to share that it was probably the best time to invest during a crisis.
As challenging as the job sounded, as a young man, it was considered fun and lots of opportunities to learn about a new country and a new project beyond our own shores. But even our Chinese colleagues and friends did not know how difficult it was to even invite companies’ executives to visit SIP, because not many of them know how to do cold calls. I started to learn what was rejections and how the feeling of being rejected but it also trained me to accept rejections with grace and how to reject gracefully. Guess this was the time that I learnt what was rejection was never about failure a step towards success.
