Getting started

Born in a village in northern Jiangsu Province in 1970, Gao is the only son from a poor family and has five elder sisters. After graduating from a college in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province with a bachelor degree in industrial design in 1994, Gao worked for a Chinese company and then a Singaporean firm in Suzhou until 1997, when he started his own business.

"Since I was a little boy, my mother had been telling me that I am the hope of the whole family. My biggest wish was to earn a lot of money to allow them to have a better life," Gao recalls.

His mother was suffering from a heart disease and could not afford surgery costing 100,000 yuan.

"It would take too long to earn that money if I continued to work for others, so I decided to do business on my own," Gao says.

He earned his first windfall in 2000 by running a translation agency. But it was too late. His mother died on the operating table.

"My whole world almost collapsed and I suddenly lost the driving force for work," Gao says. The grief-stricken man handed the company over to a friend.

Things changed when Gao's daughter was born. The young father pulled himself together. "Life is different when you become a dad," he says.

With an expanding number of companies using Suzhou as their manufacturing base, the demand for workers grew. But most human resource companies in Suzhou were still focused on headhunting for white-collar office workers.

Gao established Humanpool and believed that he had found a niche market: sourcing blue-collar workers, an approach that has been used in the US and Japan for decades.

Diversity

Blue-collar labor dispatch currently accounts for more than 70 percent of Humanpool's business. But Gao hopes to lower that percentage to about 30 percent in the future by diversifying.

A major reason is regulatory uncertainty in labor dispatch. China has no provision governing labor dispatch services.

"Our No 1 challenge is the lack of clear rules for this game," says Gao, adding that a number of similar companies mushroomed in the past two years and the competition is heating up.

Gao has now found new revenue sources for the company: Subcontracting in manufacturing, headhunting of skilled professional blue-collar workers and vocational training.

Eight companies, including Nabisco Food (Suzhou) Co Ltd, Suzhou Sanyo Electro-Mechanical Co Ltd and Seagate Technology International (Wuxi) Co Ltd have subcontracted part of their production lines to Humanpool.

"It is a growing trend for companies to outsource their non-core work, such as packaging, to save costs," says Zhou Jun, director of line subcontracting at Humanpool.

"The subcontracting business now accounts for only 10 percent of our sales. Mr Gao has set a target for us - 40 percent by 2010," Zhou adds.

(China Daily 06/02/2007 page12)

1

2

3

(For more biz stories, please visit Industry Updates)