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This China business podcast was brought to you by The China Business Show and wsRadio.com. About Janet CarmoskyJanet is a career China business specialist who brings China executional competency and strategic counsel to foreign invested businesses, and similarly advises Chinese government organizations on effective international communications and growth strategies. After earning a degree in Chinese studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985, Janet moved to Xi’an, married a Chinese man and spent the next 18 years - as Janet Zhang - living and doing business in China. During this time, spent mainly in Xi’an, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, with sabbaticals in Washington D.C. and Silicon Valley, she developed her extensive knowledge of China’s commercial landscape and the patterns of the US-China economic relationship. Fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, she spent the 1980’s in trading, sourcing and buying agency projects before moving into strategy consulting with Coopers & Lybrand in Shanghai. Moving for the next 15 years between operations - mainly in China’s retail sector - and consulting, Janet held senior management positions in private equity (VP of Richina Capital), systems integration (COO, Web Connection/Chinadotcom Shanghai) and public relations (Director, Burson-Marsteller Shanghai) before moving back to the United States in 2003 to help integrate PR Newswire’s China operations into their USA base. She has written for Economist publications, authored an award-winning case for IMD and the Chinese language Harvard Business Review, and written essays for travel publisher Odyssey Guides. She speaks often - particularly to organizations new to the US-China business - on how to understand and align with, rather than struggle against, the cultural and economic forces that typically frustrate executives on both sides of the divide. Below please find a transcript of the interview: Welcome back to the China Business Show, brought to you by Global Sources.com connecting global buyers and suppliers. Here is your host, Christine Lu.
CHRISTINE LU: We spoke earlier in the show with Roy Graff, Managing Director of China Contact regarding the recent agreement of approved destination status between China and the U.S. Joining us for this segment to weigh in on the significance of this recent announcement is Janet Carmosky, President of China Prospects. Janet, as always, welcome back to the China Business Show.
JANET CARMOSKY: Always a pleasure, Christine.
CHRISTINE LU: You know, we were just talking about this exact issue on the show several months ago and the opportunity that outbound Chinese tourism potentially had for the U.S. Market and here we are! They signed it, didn’t they?
JANET CARMOSKY: After all these years!
CHRISTINE LU: Yes! Now what’s your take on that? What’s the impact of it for those of us in the U.S. here and if we are in travel and tourism, what is it that you would like them to know?
JANET CARMOSKY: It’s very clearly two camps here. There are tourism bureaus at state level and sometimes tourism groups, like Marriott Hotels for example, who have been actively marketing to Chinese travelers for some period of time; and so they are in a position to have an organization on the ground in China that is going to start pushing out product, now that we understand how the Chinese travel, here is a very specific package we’d like to offer you to travel we’d like to offer you come to Hawaii or California and Hallelujah you can finally do this as a group now and then the other camp is our tourism bureaus companies who are just kind of flat on their feet and have possibly been toying around with the idea, “Oh yes, it’s coming and one of these days it will happen” and “oh yes, I realize it’s going to be ten times bigger then the Japanese, but then…let’s do something about it next year maybe,” and suddenly there is an opportunity for people to organize and get a little bit of help. Sort of put together a strategy and I would say that that is the vast majority of tourism in the U.S. tourism industry.
CHRISTINE LU: Now, flat on their feet? Why is that if they do understand the potential? And I’m sure they keep in touch with the trends going on internationally? I mean, Chinese tourism is big in all the other markets, except the U.S. so far because of this issue, now that the restrictions have finally been lifted. Janet, why isn’t there a big – like Roy mentioned, a big announcement in the mainstream media about this?
JANET CARMOSKY: That’s a very good question. And you’d think that since the United States has been affectively exporting dollars hand over fists to China for more then a decade – two decades now, it would be very exciting to the policy makers of the U.S. government to have an opportunity to get some of that money back by selling tourism services to the Chinese and I think the mental block that prevents us from being more excited about it is that there is a perception among people in the tourism industry that there aren’t that many Chinese. That they don’t have a lot of money, they don’t like to spend money; and frankly there just so unfamiliar and I think that tourism industry in the United States has been so focused on the UK on Germany on Japan, and these huge sources of millions and millions of tourists that for them the idea of half a million or a million Chinese – they don’t understand that this is not a finite number that’s never going to grow. This really is the future and it’s culturally so unfamiliar when you compare it to – we sort of can understand how to market from England to Germany. Markets for the Chinese, the perception that I run into a lot is well, we’ve marketed to the Japanese so we are just going to “tweak” that a little bit.
CHRISTINE LU: Oh no! Big mistake!”
JANET CARMOSKY: All of us who know anything about this, who have spent any of our lives in Asia and working with Chinese and Japanese people say, we have on one hand a denial that there is a real opportunity, and on the other hand a complacency that this is going to be a rehash of what we did for the Japanese and it’s unfortunate, I think it’s going to take the U.S. tourism companies who are sort of flat on their feet a year or two or three or four and they are going to go through the curve that Europe went through. While they had an opportunity (there still is an opportunity) for the US to learn from the European companies and frankly from the Asian companies who have been receiving a larger numbers of Chinese guests for a while.
CHRISTINE LU: So with only 30 seconds left, if you are a U.S. Company listening right now, what is it you tell them to do? What’s the first step now, that the regulations have been lifted?
JANET CARMOSKY: Well you had Roy Graff on the show so check out: Chinacontact.org he’s one of the experts in the world. Wolfgang Arlt is one of the experts in the world on how Chinese tourists behave. I’m certainly available anytime to walk any American company or Hospitality through the early stages of getting your head wrapped around – if we want a China strategy what should we do first?
CHRISTINE LU: Careful what you wish for… What’s your contact information so Grpeople can get in touch with you.
JANET CARMOSKY:
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Janet thanks so much, for your time as always and your insights. We’ve been talking to Janet Carmosky, President of China Prospects Incorporated on the recent approved destination status agreement between the U.S. and China. Thanks for listening, I’m Christine Lu.
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