In the final installment of Alaric Fairbanks’ Asia Research interview, the General Manager of B2B International in China discusses the company’s short-term goals and offers some sound advice to anyone wanting to set up a business in China:  

What are your goals?

At a high level these include doubling our Beijing operation and opening a second office in Shanghai within the next two years.  Perhaps equally high on our list of priorities is that it is important that the whole team, including myself, finds work and life interesting, stimulating and enjoyable.

What advice would you give to someone wanting to set up a market research company in China today?

Be different, and be good at it.  Despite being a relatively emergent market, there is plenty of competition, much of it competing on price.  Anyone considering setting up must be aware of this and be able to offer something different.  Linked to this, do not be afraid of challenging orthodoxies or perceptions, particularly regarding methodologies, and be prepared to try new approaches.

In the second of our three-part blog series, Alaric Fairbanks tells Asia Research about the successes and challenges B2B International has encountered over the past couple of years in China:

How have you managed to create your business?

I think our success so far comes from close attention to our two major stake-holder groups: clients and staff. To some extent we had an advantage in that we had already been conducting projects in China for about 5 years, and some of our clients from our home markets were interested in further research in China. Like many emerging markets, a lot of the companies driving research early on were foreign, and although market research in China has a history of over 20 years, b2b research is relatively new.  We were able to leverage our position, client base and reputation outside China to assist in building the business here. This was a help, but a priority was still to generate business ourselves from both outside and within China; indeed we have seen a movement in less than two years from foreign companies commissioning work from outside China, to local offices of foreign companies, and increasingly to domestic enterprises.  The team that we have built in China has also been crucial in developing the business and we have been fortunate in attracting and retaining a highly motivated team.

What are your main challenges today?

Right now my immediate concern is finding new premises, as we have outgrown our current office in Beijing.  This practical issue aside, the challenges focus on maintaining our momentum in potentially challenging times.  Also, China continues to develop and change rapidly and differently, and this potentially has huge opportunities for the way we work – for example we are currently looking to develop our use of web 2.0 methodologies in b2b research.  Here, we have already tried IM and SN applications for both recruitment and interviewing, and we are keen to explore and develop these applications, particularly for in-depth qualitative data collection.

The final installment of the interview will be our next blog post, so check back in to read it soon. 

In the latest issue of Asia Research, Alaric Fairbanks, General Manager of B2B International in Beijing, talks about setting up and running a market research company in China.  Over the next three blog posts, we will serialize his interview:

Tell me about B2B International

As the name implies, we work in b2b markets and are international.  We are a specialist business-to-business market research company, with our group headquarters in the United Kingdom and subsidiaries in New York and, of course, Beijing.  Our focus is exclusively b2b, and although we cover all b2b markets, we have particular strengths in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, engineering, construction and financial services.  In terms of services, our main focus is on full service research, covering market assessment, segmentation, customer satisfaction, new product development, competitor analysis and pricing studies, and our major clients are multi-national firms engaged in b2b markets.  In Asia we also complement our full service work with data collection.

What were the main challenges when you first set up the business?

We set up permanently here in 2006 and in many ways the challenges we faced when setting up in China were similar to those that many foreign-invested businesses in China, including some of our clients, face.  These include recruiting staff, adapting and integrating systems and working styles into the local conditions, and on a practical level finding reliable partners or suppliers, particularly in areas such as IT and financial services.  I regard these as important challenges to deal with, but the primary issue from day one was, and remains, generating business and delivering quality work.

Look out for Part 2 of the interview in our next blog post.

Mr. Alaric Fairbanks talks about the practical suggestions to Chinese white collar on how to deal with the global financial crisis in a recent print media interview, called Rich Weekly.  

He explains that the reasons caused the financial crisis in western markets also indicated the best way to avoid the crisis. He suggested:” Do not buy things you do not need and can not afford.”

Alaric, is the general manager of B2B International China operation. He has been living and working in China since 1994.