Chinese entrepreneurs overseas need more confidence

TOKYO -- Overseas Chinese entrepreneurs need the confidence to build up their businesses and, furthermore, have the responsibilities to improve image of Chinese people, said Yan Hao, chairman of Chinese Chamber of Commerce of Japan (CCCJ).

Yan, also the chairman and the chief executive officer of the Ever Progressing System (EPS) Corporation, told Xinhua in a recent interview that the key to business buildup is dare to think and to act, adding Chinese businessmen need to create big things, such as the Softbank, one of Japan's top telecommunication corporation that created by a Korean in Japan.

The EPS, which was established in 1991 by Yan with his friends, now has become Japan's, and even an Asian leading contract research organization (CRO) that provides support to pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries in the form of research services outsourced on a contract basis.

Majored in medical statistics in the University of Tokyo in a time that the subject just sprang up in Japan, Yan and his supervisor helped many Japanese medical companies fulfilled programs on the medical statistics, giving him abundant of practical experiences.

In 1994, Yan took a 10-year large clinical trial program by Japan's health ministry and the outcome was published in the Lancet, one of the most famous international medical magazine, ushering Yan's EPS to the international arena.

Now, the EPS is one of the top 10 CRO companies worldwide and the largest one in Asia, while its subsidiaries have reached Japan, China, South Korea, Singapore and the United States and other areas, covering many high-tech areas like drug development, clinical trial development and management and clinical data statistics and analysis.

"To pioneer a cause overseas will definitely suffer from various difficulties, even discrimination," said Yan, "but these do not mean that one can not make it. The key is that one must follow rules and laws."

"Business is to use proper and legal means to provide services to customers, create added values and gain profit so as to feed back the society by paying taxes," said Yan. "This is a right path to pursue business."

As to the future development, Yan said he will put great importance to Chinese market in a move to help China develop health industry through introducing advanced Japanese technologies.

"I'd like to be a bridge of technical cooperation between China and Japan," said Yan.

"It will help China to upgrade its health industry and make Japanese firms to follow the strategy so as to amplify the effects that made by EPS itself."

Yan hopes he can develop and produce new drug and medical apparatus and instruments in China and increasingly focus on China 's nursing and retirement areas.

As a Chinese entrepreneur, Yan also pays much attention to improve and maintain the image of Chinese businessmen and their motherland by actively involving in charity activities.

Besides subsidizing Chinese overseas students and Chinese schools in Japan, Yan and the CCCJ also made large donations to quake-and-tsunami-hit areas in northeast part of Japan after the disaster in March 2011.

"The image of Chinese community related interests to every overseas Chinese and it is necessary to cohere with them so as to improve the image," said Yan.