China becomes the new Silicon Valley

During a recent visit to San Francisco, Dr Kai Fu Lee, the former head of Google China, urged venture capitalists and financiers to make increased investments in China's entrepreneurial technology sector.

"The amazing opportunity in China is its people... engineers who are amazing developers, winners of any world programming championships. Yet these great people and talent who want to start their own companies need a lot of help... It's very hard to get early stage funding," said Lee, speaking specifically to the venture capital community who were essential to building the start-up technology ecosystem in Silicon Valley. Lee left Google China late last year to start Innovation Works, an incubator aimed at nurturing the next generation of Chinese entrepreneurs.

Because of the large pool of engineers who command average market salaries that are one tenth those of Silicon Valley's, companies are often able to hire skilled technical workers at a fraction of the cost. However, the greatest demand that still remains in the talent market is for experienced product managers who can take ideas and products to market.

"In China, there tend to be many of technically strong people but not necessarily the type of people with both a strong technical and market sense," said Larry Wang, who runs Wang & Li Asia Resources, a China-recruitment firm.

According to Wang's estimates, 45 percent of recent openings are in the technology sector, with a heavy focus on IT services. While the current growth is driven in large part by China-focused companies such as Youku and Ganji that emulate existing services developed primarily in Silicon Valley, industry watchers such as Wang predict that future trends will show more Chinese companies expanding into overseas markets.

Silicon Valley engineers such as Yifan Cao have also taken note of this shift, drawn by both the country's opportunities and changing environment. When the mechanical engineer began looking for a job again last year, he decided to look beyond the San Francisco Bay Area and flew to China in search of new opportunities; Kazinform cites China Daily.

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