Firms claim innovation and training key to their success

Office buildings of renowned companies at the Shanghai Pudong Software Park. CHINA DAILY

Through innovation the Shanghai Pudong Software Park, known as SPSP, is on the way to industrial agglomeration, enterprise incubation, information fusion and creation of cloud platforms.

"These are steps the park has taken to carry out its industry transformation strategy," said a SPSP Co Ltd manager in charge of innovation, who asked not to be identified.

He said an example was the SAP China Institute, which won three times as many patents in 2013 than in 2012, thanks to its innovation efforts.

The institute's president, Li Ruicheng, said through innovation the organization developed three major products targeting the Chinese market. He said these included new financial solutions for Chinese customers, SAP Anywhere and the Chinese version of cash and liquidity management.

"They were the result of the strategic transformation SAP launched in 2013," Li said.

SAP provides business solutions for small and medium-sized enterprises, which account for 80 percent of its clients.

"We try to keep the balance between innovation and business value, so that we can develop market-oriented products for customers," he said.

Li's opinions were echoed by Pang Shengdong, chairman and CEO of 2345.com. Pang attributed his company's success to innovation in talent recruitment, training and evaluation mechanisms.

He spoke highly of what the company had done in upgrading its personnel structure instead of the ideal revenue it had gained, and said that high quality talents stimulated its fast growth.

"We didn't follow others in innovating technologies and business models," said Wang Zhidong, vice-president of Sihua Tech.

"We avoided investment mistakes because we didn't blindly copy what others were doing."

The park leads the nation in the chip design industry with many famous enterprises based, including Texas Instruments, Marvell and Freescale Semiconductor.

Meanwhile, domestic chip enterprises have also reinforced their innovation ability, making their technical levels improved.

Thanks to the innovation effort, these enterprise, including Memsic Semiconductor which produces sensor chips, Maxscent developing digital TV chips and Mvsilicon producing consumer electronics chips, have sharpened their competitive edge and narrowed the gap with the world advanced level.

Service outsourcing

SPSP is home to a large number of the world's leading service outsourcing and software export enterprises, including Citigroup Software, PWC Information and Kyocera Information.

The Citigroup Services and Technology (China) Limited, the world's leading financial service outsourcing provider, develops software and offers technical support for customers from more than 60 countries and regions in the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and Europe.

"The key to the business is to train qualified software developers," said Li Yuangang, general manager of CSTC.

Every year his company invites financial experts from China and abroad to give lectures and the organization sends employees to New York, London, Singapore and Tokyo to learn about new financial products and communicate with local customers, he added.

Another leading software and technology service enterprise, SunGard, offers disaster recovery solutions, IT-managed services, information consulting services and business management software. The company has yearly revenue of more than $4 billion.

SunGard China has about 300 enterprises as its customers, 90 percent of which are banks, securities, futures, funds and insurance companies. The organization provides financial service institutions with international products and solutions that target the China market, said its President Zhu Ping.

Shanghai ChinaLink Professional Services Co Ltd continued to target high-end customers when the city's financial service outsourcing started to move its low-end business to the second- and third-tier cities.

"The company's rich experience in the bank and credit card business is valuable to servicing high-end customers," said Xu Jian, deputy general manager of Shanghai ChinaLink.

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