Construction Magazine August 2018 | Page 19

ASIA to shift from foreign to local and some 70 % of our clients are Chinese now with the rest foreign . So , that change is quite substantial and we ’ re now doing 4,000,000 sqm projects .
Currently , we are working for insurance companies like Ping An Insurance and financial institutions such as Shanghai Stock Exchange , that we were never able to get in touch with 10 years ago . E-commerce is expanding so fast and we have done an increasing amount of work in logistics relating to that sector , with clients such as JD . Com and Alibaba . We ’ re doing a 800,000 sqm data centre campus for them and companies like JD . Com , who is the second biggest e-commerce company here . We are also doing a lot of campus work for telecommunication giants Huawei and Tencent .
Now we ’ re helping also lot of local developers going overseas to do projects in the likes of India , Vietnam , Australia and Italy . Something like
90 % of the senior management in Chinese companies cannot speak English and so that ’ s why we have a very major role to play .
China is changing so quickly . The second-child policy was introduced in 2015 and now the birth rate is 22mn babies per year with estimates this will increase to 30m very soon . The wealth of the Chinese community is expanding and the middle class is quite affluent now , so they ’ re prepared to pay a lot of money for their children ’ s education . Consequently , international schooling is a booming market and we are currently working for AIS , Yew Chong International School , Wellington and Harrow from UK who all have big expansion plans in the coming few years .
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