HONG KONG: With the successful bidding for a fourth generation (4G) Broadband Wireless Access services licence, China Mobile Hong Kong, the mobile operator formerly known as Peoples, is looking forward to further expanding its business and securing a firm foothold in the highly competitive telecommunication services market in the SAR.

"Business turnover is expanding, the customer base is increasing and staff morale is running high at China Mobile Hong Kong," said Willie Wong, the company's director and vice-president in an exclusive interview with China Daily.

Since November 2008, the company previously called China Mobile Peoples, has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Mobile and was renamed China Mobile Hong Kong.

He said the business turnover and profit level have been increasing in tandem with staff morale since the acquisition, adding that coupled with acquisition of a new 4G licence early this year, all the staff have very great confidence in the future of the company.

"A brand name is very important to the service industry," said Wong. "Before the acquisition, Peoples was just a small company that did not even have a 3G licence, but now our staff find that the parent company is a very big company which has good business prospects and assures them a bright future," he observed.

In Hong Kong, the telecommunications service market is hyper-competitive and rather irrational. By his admission, it is very difficult for a small company without provision of even 3G services to break through and compete with the big players.

"Making use of the niche that our parent company gives us, we offer a new kind of cross-boundary mainland-Hong Kong service that our competitors do not have," he explained.

"Knowing that over a million people travel to and from the two regions everyday, we launched a new 'one card-several numbers' service in November last year. Our marketing strategy is to attract more customers at reasonable prices. Even though the service charges and per capita profit are low, we manage greater profits by means of a bigger customer base," he said.

Wong added that after acquisition by China Mobile, the parent company has injected into the Hong Kong subsidiary a new kind of corporate culture, while retaining the Hong Kong elements.

"Apart from making money, the parent company asks us to fulfill social corporate responsibility and contribute to charities and the community," he said. In addition, China Mobile Hong Kong adopts a customer-oriented culture that caters to the needs of the customers.

"Given this is a service industry, customers have very high mobility and can come and go very quickly," he pointed out. "If we provide them caring services, we will keep them. So in our company, our staff are always encouraged to think from the angle of the customers."

Willie Wong, a Hong Kong citizen who joined Peoples in 2004, has encountered ups and downs with the company through the years. The year 1999 was at the lowest ebb because the customer base was small and the company did not have money to further invest, prompting a great number of staff to leave.

The company began to make money in 2000. After the acquisition by China Mobile in 2006, the company started to climb new heights, but the local staff found it hard to adapt to cultural differences between the mainland and Hong Kong in the first two years.

Apart from video conferences with representatives from 32 provinces and cities on a daily basis, Wong said it was difficult to learn Putonghua and read the simplified Chinese characters. And since the parent company in Beijing is such a large organization, it is sometimes difficult to find the person he wants to report to or seek instructions from, he admitted. Besides, written forms of communication are not prevalent within the parent company, while verbal instructions are sometimes not very clear-cut.

China Mobile Hong Kong has employed tutors to teach Putonghua to the staff after office hours, he disclosed.

"I am always the only student in my class," he confessed, self-effacingly alluding to a need for intensive one-on-one instruction.

In preparing for the acquisition in 2006, the parent company sent four staff from Beijing to work in Hong Kong. Last year, two of them went home and so there are only two mainland staff among the close to 1,000 employees.

"I think they are more influenced by the Hong Kong culture," observed Wong. "They are impressed by the Hong Kong way of doing things as we have here the telecommunications ordinance and employment ordinance to govern our operations and staff welfare. They are also very pleased to use Hong Kong as the bridgehead in making their strides into the international market."

(HK Edition 10/22/2009 page4)