Survey indicates 27% multinationals in China lay off employees to survive global financial crisis

BEIJING. February 20. KAZINFORM Multinational firms in China have shrunk payroll and recruitment as they struggle to survive in the global financial tsunami even regardless of laying off employees, China Daily reported Friday.

According to a survey by FESCO, a Beijing-based recruitment services provider for multinational companies, nearly 70 percent of the firms it polled have said they would trim their recruitment requirements for this year, while 27 percent said they had already started laying off employees. FESCO polled 356 of its clients spread across the country and engaged a wide range of industries for the survey. More than 44 percent of the human resources managers surveyed admitted that their companies had slashed jobs, while 25 percent of the companies polled said they had plans to cut jobs this year, according to a survey conducted by KingField Management, a Guangzhou-based recruitment and executive search firm. KingField surveyed 216 companies based in south China's Pearl River Delta region, half of which are multinational companies like Dupont and Bosch, according to Ren Ge, general manager of its China operations. Finance, telecommunications and IT industries were the hardest-hit industries, according to both surveys. Banks, insurers and asset managers worldwide had announced 325,000 job cuts since August 2007, when the credit crisis began to intensify, according to Thomson Reuters calculations until Feb.12. Some global companies have also begun to downsize staff at their China operations, but most of them are carrying out such plans cautiously, experts said; Kazinform cites Xinhua. According to the KingField survey, of the companies that had already axed jobs, 68 percent had only cut less than 10 percent of their workforce. "It shows that a majority of the companies are treading cautiously on cutting jobs," said Zeng Jiangtao, senior recruitment consultant with the KingFeild. Companies who had cut jobs or were considering such moves could be generally divided into two groups, said experts. "The first category has firms like Citibank, Motorola, etc. who are actually impacted by the crisis and have no other choice other than to cut jobs to avoid bankruptcy," said Charles Lee from the Beijing office of Antal International, a British recruitment company. "The other sections are those that are restructuring operations due to the crisis and have resorted to layoffs as part of this strategy," Lee said.