Risks

If oversight and leadership support for operations in China is done poorly, an organization’s greatest risk is that it will lack accurate information about the real situation in China. This leads to:

• The wrong timeline and unreasonable expectations regarding time-to-profit.
• The wrong capital budget.
• The wrong mix of people.
• Pirated intellectual property (you won’t know until long after the fact).
• Overextension by taking on the whole Chinese market all at once.
• Missed market opportunities.
• Sub-optimal growth.

Opportunities

If oversight and leadership support for operations in China is done expertly, then an organization’s most significant opportunity is rapid growth due to the sheer size of the market. Some companies are:

• Growing distribution from $5-20 million dollars in a year.
• Realizing 50 percent growth in their overall sales in the China market.
• With the right resources focused on the market, rapid growth from $5 million to a $100 million is not unknown

The key to unlocking these opportunities is to have the right management structure with healthy reporting infrastructure. Leveraging the opportunities in China is primarily about managing the implementation risk.