The faces of China’s tech giants get younger to stay competitive

Source: Xinhua | 2019-03-26

Chinese tech giants are in the hunt for young, energetic staff to take the place, in some cases, of veteran managers.

Last week, Tencent Holdings confirmed plans to reshuffle 10 percent of its managers.

“Let some older members of management retire from their positions,” Tencent Holdings President Martin Lau said. “Their jobs will be taken up by younger people, new colleagues who may be more passionate.”

Analysts said the move to promote younger managers is driven in part by the rise of a new generation of Chinese Internet companies such as Pinduoduo and Bytedance, which are mostly run by entrepreneurs and engineers born in the 1980s or 1990s.

“The environment and external pressures are pushing these companies to reform, if the leadership is too old, it’s easy for them to fall behind,” said Li Chengdong, a Beijing-based tech analyst who used to work at Tencent and e-commerce giant JD.com Inc.

“In the US and Europe you rarely see companies going through structural reform every other year, but it’s quite common in China ... core leadership can be replaced within a very short amount of time.”

At Baidu, CEO Robin Li said in an internal letter — which the company made public — that it plans to accelerate efforts to become more youthful this year by promoting more workers born after 1980, and also announced an executive retirement plan.

The first executive to leave under that plan is its president for new business, Zhang Yaqin, who will retire in October, Li said. Local media reported Zhang’s age as 53.

“For senior managers who have worked hard for the company and accompanied its growth, if they want to choose a new life because of personal or family reasons, we will take care of them under the executive retirement plan,” Li wrote.

A Baidu spokesman said that age is not a factor in whether managers chose to retire or not and that it was up to them if they wanted to join the plan.

Lei Jun, chief of Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, said at a news conference on March 20 that the company was appointing new, younger general department managers as part of an organizational restructuring.

A Xiaomi spokesman said the company was not cutting the senior management team but that it needed to promote “younger talents” to support its rapid expansion.

Workers in their 30s and 40s say they had come to accept the preference for youth but worried that it was becoming more extreme, especially in up-and-coming fields such as artificial intelligence.

“I’m not worrying so much about losing my job, but certainly there is worry that I will not get promoted,” said a 38-year-old engineer at JD.com. Like other employees interviewed for this story, he declined to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

Some in the tech industry say older employees can still get ahead if they are top performers. At telecom giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, known for an aggressive internal culture, one employee defended the approach as common in the industry. “Companies are moving away from the traditional iron rice bowl type of mentality,” he said.