Are Finnish Small-Medium sized businesses missing out on the Red Euro while big business is not?
The Chinese New Year celebrations last Friday were a testament of how big and influential the Chinese market is becoming for Finland. Scan down the list and you will see how much investment was put into the events:
…and that was just the free stuff, it does not even include the Grand Chinese Concert later that night.
Thinking about it I had a kind of epiphany. We have had a few clients asking about Chinese translations for the websites, but most of our work has been focused on the romance languages like French, Italian, Spanish and German. However, when I saw the incredible amount of money, effort and resources that must have been spent, I wondered why aren’t there more Chinese translation gigs, especially from the hospitality industry.
So why are the majority of Finnish small-medium sized businesses still focusing on attracting European and Nordic enquires rather than aiming their scopes to the far east?
The only thing I can come up with is that Finnish small and medium sized businesses are still trepidatious and scared of dealing with the Chinese market. Why? Maybe it is because the culture and language are so different that business owners are actually afraid of opening a Pandora’s box by directly advertising to the Chinese market. Maybe it is because they feel that there are no companies that can help them service the tourists or enquiries if they actually do come.
Well that is merely dancing with shadows and getting enquiries and learning to deal with them properly is a lot better than not getting enquiries at all.
So, I would like to appeal to small and medium sized businesses to get their act together by providing just a few pieces of statistics and facts:
Firstly, in terms of tourism the Chinese segment has quickly taken first place as the most valuable. That is not all, despite being number one, it is also still growing exponentially with a year-on-year increase of 36% for 2016 as reported by www.stat.fi. The chart below also amazes me as Japanese tourism has increased by 22% and German tourism only 8%. So why am I getting more German translation jobs than Chinese or Japanese? Something is not right.
Secondly, in July Finnair announced a long-term strategic partnership with Alibaba’s online travel platform Alitrip. What is important is that Finnair was the first European airline to do this which is a pretty good indication that Chinese tourism is heavily focusing on Finland as a premium destination. What is even crazier is that Alibaba's Marketing Director commented that they could even bring as many as a million tourists a year to Finland if they wanted to. However, they are actually going to restrict it because “the user experience would be damaged” if there were masses of Chinese people travelling to Finland at the same time. If you want to see how crazy they are about attracting the Chinese to Lapland have a look at the video below:
It is important to realise that this love affair with Finland does not seem to be a fleeting crush. To give you a better idea of Finland’s charm over the Chinese, there was a really nice story reported in September last year in Helsingin Sanomat where a Chinese businessman, Gao Feng, came and fell in love with Finland during a stop-over. He liked Finland so much he offered a €150k sponsorship donation to the local football team Santa Claus FC over the phone. Then he decided to donate over €1 million over the next 10 years to assist tourism studies at the University of Lapland. The donation was described as “one of the most significant international donations that any of the Finnish universities have ever received”.
It seems that Finnish big business is definitely grabbing all the opportunities it can:
- In September last year, the Chinese state-owned Beijing Capital Investment (BCI) started a 400-million-euro Nordic fund with a focus on Finland for it cleantech, biotech and production technologies.
- In February last year, a Chinese company, Sunshine Kaidi, announced that it would invest €1 billion in a second generation biofuels refinery in Kemi.
- The Finnish National Agency for Education has pegged Asian countries as being the fastest growing foreign student group coming to Finland for university education. With investments like those outlined above it would be hard to see how China won’t be at the top of that list.
- At the end of 2015, Beijing Normal University and Helsinki Uni signed a cross Sino – Finnish collaboration agreement for setting up a national Joint Learning Innovation Institute as well as a masters and research programme.
While this article started as just a little food for thought, reading back I really feel that Finland’s small to medium sized companies can do with a bit of courage and make real efforts to capitalise on this opportunity. After all, big business is doing it and doing it well. So, if you are one of those companies that are missing the boat by not having the materials to grab the Red Euros with both hands that are potentially falling from the sky right now, then get in touch.
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