Chinese trade in Tanzania: Localized and organized
- By Pang Li
0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail China.org.cn, September 29, 2012
Over several decades of doing business in Tanzania, Chinese companies and businessmen have gradually managed to localize their business by offering job opportunities to local people. In addition, these companies have learned to organize themselves in order to protect their own rights.
Many Chinese companies have realized that it is in their best interest to look at the bigger, long-term picture when doing business on a local scale. Integrating their businesses into the local society thus has become their ultimate goal. As a means to an end, offering jobs to local residents is a natural first step and even an obligation.
Since 2001, China Communications Construction Company Limited has signed deals worth a total of US$247 million with Tanzania concerning the construction of roads, bridges and ports . The company employs about 180 Chinese workers and over 3,200 Tanzanian workers in Tanzania right now, according to Pei Yan, general director of the company's Tanzania Office. Pei said that the number of local workers employed in the company is up to 15 times that of Chinese workers in Tanzania right now.
Pei said that his company had previously brought hundreds of Chinese workers into Tanzania and finished their projects in complete isolation from the outside world. But they were often criticized for not providing any job opportunities to the locals .
Later on, his company came to understand that it is their social responsibility to hire locals. "Now, it is our company's policy to hire more local workers and promote more of them onto senior positions," he said. At the same time, Pei did not deny that they could cut labor costs and avoid trouble with local immigration bureaucracy by doing so.
