Small is not beautiful

摘要

Entrepreneurs do more with less, proclaimed Fiona Woolf this week on a visit to Shanghai. Lady Woolf, the current Lord Mayor of the City of London, was speaking at an academic conference devoted to helping small and medium enterprises (smes) flourish in China. These businesses face all of the same obstacles as big firms trying to enter China but have far fewer resources. Intellectual-property rights are hard and costly to defend. The tangle of red tape involved in tax, compliance, customs clearance, business registration and so on can overwhelm small firms. Alexandra Voss of the German Chamber of Commerce points out that local firms often work overtime and on weekends during negotia-tions-and that foreign smes with staff shortages and little local knowledge can quickly get overwhelmed.