China Wants To Drain Some Detroit Brain

by Bertel Schmitt

December 18th, 2008 10:58 AM

Are you in automotive R&D? Experience and successful track record in automotive marketing? Worried about your job? Polish up your resume. Chinese automakers are hiring. “After considering the risk of buying US auto manufacturers’ assets, Chinese automakers realized that targeting their research and development (R&D) talent would be a more realistic and profitable option,” writes China Daily today.

China Daily called around. Zeng Qinghong, General Manager of Guangzhou Automobile Group, for instance said that his company is not interested at all in buying brands or whole companies in the U.S.A. However, he’s very interested in US auto professionals. The head of his research center had already been on a recruitment trip to the US, and he was surprised: “Interest shown by US auto talents in Guangzhou Auto exceeded expectations.” Xu Heyi, board chairman of Beijing Automotive Industry Corp said that they are also interested in talent from the US. Even the Chinese government is prodding their auto industrialists to buy themselves some foreign know-how.

Says China Daily: “In recent years, China’s auto industry experienced a rapid annual growth of over 20 percent. However, a shortage of technical experts and high level management executives became a bottleneck for the growing industry. A capable auto R&D engineer in the US typically has eight to ten years of experience in the industry, while higher education for professional R&D experts in China is still a thing of the future.”

Shanghai Securities News finds a fly in the ointment: Money. They figure, the annual after tax wages of an auto engineer with ten years of R&D experience in the US is between $120,000 and $140,000, “a salary Chinese auto manufacturers are not able to afford.” Not true. I happen to know what joint ventures pay for top talent, and it’s way above that. Add to this the perks of a serviced apartment, a live-in maid that charges you $200 a month if you pay a lot, cost of living way below the US, and the prospects look quite interesting. If you are single, half of China will want to marry you. If you are married, your wife won’t want to go home where she has to cook and make her husband do the dishes. Life in Guangzhou, Shanghai, or Beijing would definitely be better than in Detroit. Just don’t let them lure you to the smaller cities inland. You’d go bonkers.

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Fallout11 on Dec 19, 2008

In my experience, Mr. Derbyshire could just as easily been describing the United States in the above paragraph. Simply substitute the appropriate words, and voila. Very interesting. I'd entertain a few years in China, as engineering is my field. My only fear would be that Crackers is roughly correct, it would be strictly a temporary affair and the Chinese will be only to quick to drop you once they've learned what they can, and China-clone it themselves (as has been the general case with everything else Chinese of late).

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Bertel Schmitt on Dec 19, 2008

I wouldn't worry about obsolsescence. The US and European standards are a moving target. I spend most of my time explaining the most simple ECE rules again and again. Here is the beauty: On Chinese Universities, you either learn languages, or you learn engineering. There is an incredible shortage of engineers who speak English, or any foreign language.

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