While America is divided by the increasing outsourcing of technology to India, Japan appears to be embracing the practice in China.
Sinocom Software Group is one of the biggest outsourcing companies in China and it has forged relationships with many of Japan's top companies.
Chairman and chief executive Wang Zhiqiang said business had been brisk. 'Last year we had sales of $110 million, which represented 43 per cent year-on-year growth. We have been able to maintain this growth for three years,' he said.
Building his team was a challenge because Chinese programmers were skilled coders but they were generally inexperienced at developing serious applications.
'It is not that easy to put together really good software. In China, for example, a relatively small group can work well together but larger ones sometimes have problems,' he said.
'I have seen a bank use a foreign product that worked within 10 minutes. The same task done by local programmers took half a day. We are learning how to make things much better. It is really more a matter of management than programming skill. We hire a lot of Chinese students who have studied and worked abroad and that gives us an edge,' he said.
Before founding Sinocom in 1995, Mr Wang worked for Oracle in Beijing. He remained on good terms with the database giant and was invited to speak at an Oracle event in Shanghai in 1996. There, he met people from NEC Soft - the software arm of NEC.
