When I got my position transferred and didn’t have to work with staff from China Mobile any longer, I felt relieved.
State-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China have been notorious for their inefficiency. As one of the largest SOEs in China, China Mobile is totally worthy of the reputation.
As one of the three mobile telecom carriers and the largest one of them, China Mobile never has to worry about revenue, yet its behaviors of arbitrary charging are not restrained until recent years.
Its monopoly position has inevitably caused inefficiency, and even stupidness. Sometimes you just cannot imagine how inefficient and stupid they are.
Instead of being constructive and helpful, staff of China Mobile I met are almost always uncooperative, destructive and superfluous in work. Knowing little about what they are responsible for, they are good at suspecting, rejecting and discarding your plans, but proposing ridiculous and infeasible ones. The torturous thing is that, as an employee from the outsourcing company, I had to rely on their rights to get things down.
I worked in a government institution before for three years, the government agencies are also inefficient, but staff there are not stupid; they may be idle, but they seldom screw things up. That’s the difference.
Usually senior management of China Mobile tries to make some achievements and stop private enterprises from snatching food from their jaws, but they always fail.
A typical example is Fetion, an IM product designed to compete with QQ, which is the most popular IM tool from Tencent, but a series of strategic mistakes and product defects have prevented Fetion from becoming really popular, even though China Mobile has unmatched natural advantages and deep pockets for marketing.
Such situation is attributable to its rigid work mechanism, as well as ignorant staff and negative outsourcing companies, who are used to present deceptive and meaningless KPIs, it’s easy to fudge numbers by taking improper calculation methods or referring to inaccurate sources.
China’s new administration has vowed to promote efficiency of SOEs, but there is a long and hard way ahead.
