Contact: Kimberly Little
Expert available to speak on China's accession to WTO; opportunities for U.S. companies
China's nearly certain accession to the World Trade Organization this June, as well as its imminent trade deal with the United States, will create tremendous business opportunities for U.S. companies, particularly those in high tech.
Assistant professor of marketing Shi Zhang, of The Anderson School at UCLA, sees significant opportunities for computer, software, and telecommunications companies, as China's relatively untapped market for high tech products becomes more open.
The Chinese have been quick to adopt the fax machine and cell phone, but the personal computer has yet to generate mass appeal. Computer usage in China is far below that of the United States. The standard U.S. keyboard, which requires Chinese users to type combinations of Western letters to produce Chinese characters, has remained one of the stumbling blocks to more widespread PC and Internet use.
For this reason, Zhang believes that voice recognition technologies hold the greatest potential in China. Allowing Chinese PC users to directly communicate with Internet services in their native language, rather than transliterating Chinese through a U.S. keyboard, will open the market wide, allowing Chinese from varying educational backgrounds to access the Internet.
China's membership in the WTO may also provide another benefit to U.S. high tech companies, according to Zhang. Traditionally, "piracy," or intellectual property law violation, has been a serious problem in China. Zhang believes that once China is a formal member of the WTO, the country will step up its efforts and practices in abiding by that organization's intellectual property agreements and continuing to crack down on piracy.
With China's membership in the WTO likely to be approved, companies interested in tapping into the Chinese market should move ahead now to achieve competitive advantage. Companies able to gain a foothold in China early will most likely beat Chinese companies to the market, and as a result, commend a better position in the increasingly globalized market.
Professor Zhang's research interests are in decision making and consumer behavior, and new brand and product entry strategies. His current work focuses on the influence of mental representations of information on cognition, judgement and choice. He is the author of articles on consumer behavior research and linguistics. He holds two Ph.D.'s, one in marketing from Columbia University and the other in linguistics from the University of Arizona. He earned his M.A. in linguistics at Nankai University; and his B.A. in English from Heilongjiang University, both in China.
Shi Zhang
Assistant Professor, Marketing
The Anderson School at UCLA
310-794-6475
[email protected]
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