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A PC manufacturing plant, a printer facility, a holding company you name it, and US giant Hewlett-Packard has concrete plans to set it up in China. It's just that the deadlines for the concrete to set keep slipping. Speak to Lee Ting, chairman and CEO Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific last September and announcements are to be made imminently. Speak to him again in November and the same announcements are still waiting in the wings. Speak to him in January, same story, a well-known one to would-be investors in China. "There are quite a number of things bubbling under," says Ting, "but you know how sometimes the Chinese government can work. The authorities are probably moving as fast as we can reasonably expect but every investment proposal needs to be negotiated and it can be hard to predict how many back and forth discussions you will end up having to have. For some of our proposals, we have been negotiating for the best part of the year, for others only six or seven months."
These months of negotiating come despite many years of operating in the country--the electronics and computer firm first became active in China in the early '80s, following visits to the country by co-founder Dave Packard. What began with a representative office and customer support services was supplemented in 1985 by the company's first joint venture (JV), China Hewlett-Packard Company Ltd, where HP is the majority and the Chinese ministry of electronics the most significant minority shareholder. So far five other JVs have followed.
Ting, a Mandarin-speaking Chinese-American ("it helps an awful lot") who worked his way up through the ranks in California before heading east, has been involved in the company's Chinese expansion strategy since the early days, and is certainly no stranger to the labyrinthine ways of Beijing and the provinces. Each investment concluded to date has entailed a significant element of returning to the drawing board, as Ting explains, because "China being China," the company has had to form JVs with different domestic companies each time it has wanted...