Yeah, a weird title but that was the subject for the afternoon meeting in the Embassy of Belgium on 25 March, organized by Bencham. The meeting was attended by the Ambassador Michel Malherbe and other senior staff of the embassy.
The topic was the survey, done for a second year, on the performance of the Belgian companies in China in 2013.
The survey was done by “Moore Stephens Verschelden” and their delegates Andy Verschelden and Scott Krivokopich gave us an overview.

There are an estimated 300 Belgian companies in China. The survey worked with a total of 42 companies, and near 30 were Belgian.
I don’t try to give a full overview of the findings but these were the points I noted:
– More than 85% reported revenue growth
– increased turnover
– overall very optimistic on revenue growth for 2014 despite the economic slowdown
– most negative issue: salary cost; difficulty in finding the right people and retaining the staff
– biggest concern for 2014 is meeting sales target while in the previous year the focus was on labor cost
– pollution is indeed becoming an issue affecting business and staffing.
As a frequent speaker myself I noticed (twice in the embassy) people setting up a projector and laptop in a poor way: the (big) projector sits too high, blocking the view and the presenter often blocks the projector and mostly the slides. As a result I could see only part of the slides.
On another note: the estimate of Belgians residing in Beijing is 500 to 600.