Jia-Bin Duh graduated from the Kellogg-HKUST Executive MBA programme in 2006. Before taking the course, he held the positions of president of Microsoft (China) and president of Cisco Systems (China). He is now chairman of Mobinnova. Here he tells us what opportunities and challenges face SMEs and larger companies in their quest for expansion, and how an EMBA can benefit leaders of those organisations.
Why is it important for business leaders, whether from small companies or large multinationals, to have a global outlook?
Whether you choose to expand a business into new markets or not, you still need to be aware of what is happening globally as eventually individuals and companies from around the world will find you. Companies can no longer operate on their own without competition. Every kind of solution provider, service provider and food product provider now operates globally.
How have recent technological advances helped business to expand into new regions?
The domestic market might be very convenient because of the shorter distances involved, but modern transport has made expanding businesses far easier, so distance is no longer really a problem. For example, let's say you had a small business in Beijing a decade ago. If you wanted to expand and sell your product in Tianjin, more than 150 kilometres away, you might have thought that the cost and time of transport was too great. But, today, they have a bullet train that does the journey cheaply in 27 minutes - it has opened up a new market. Advances in telecommunications and the internet have also created a big difference. You no longer have to read newspapers or watch TV to get information; you can access information and act on it using the internet. Nowadays, you don't even need to pay for international phone calls.
What barriers are there to global strategies/expansion and how can these be overcome?