WT PARTNERSHIP
B I O
Keith Wong Executive Chairman , Asia , Managing Director ( China )
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For our business in China , employing two site staff working in a client ’ s site office when we started in 1996 in Shanghai , expanding to 50 in 2006 , to more than 500 today with 8 offices across China . We adhere to a traditional quantity surveying practice but when we started , Chinese projects were highly protected , mainly state-owned enterprise ( SOE ) government projects , although they welcomed foreign investment . And so , we followed Hong Kong developers as they delivered projects in China . At that time more than 95 % of our clients were from Hong Kong or overseas with very few local clients .
There was no quantity surveying in China then ; they had some cost engineers , but didn ’ t provide a comprehensive service as we do , from inception to completion of the project . It was not an easy task , at that time , because they just didn ’ t understand the purpose of undertaking cost control . They didn ’ t understand why they needed an independent professional to update the interest of the client side because , at that time , the local client were often very big state-owned enterprises that didn ’ t know or worry about where the money had been spent .
Our local clients grew to 10 % after seven years or so , starting from smaller projects , before getting bigger and bigger . The major opportunities were still foreign ( mainly Hong Kong ) as local investment was more or less owned by a local government or state-owned enterprise .
From 2005 to say , 2010 , most of our projects were in real estate : property development , residential , commercial , hotels , and mixed use . The client ’ s just build and sell for a quick cash return . The scale was getting bigger and bigger during that period of time ; in the UK , 50,000 sqm may have been considered to be a big project but in China , a big project by then was 500,000 sqm .
The clientele has since continued
AUGUST 2018