Neusoft’s Xing: ‘Watching my own child grow up’
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XING Bo, 43, has grown up with Neusoft Group, making a strong contribution to the rise of China’s biggest software company and developing his own new skills in the process.
Xing was a student at Northeastern University in Shenyang, capital of northeast China’s Liaoning Province, when his professor Liu Jiren started the company in a classroom.
“I remember how weak we were when we started,” he said. “But now everything is different. There’s still gap between us and companies in developed countries, but I can see that the gap is narrowing.”
Today Xing is a vice president of the Shanghai-listed company and head of its Shanghai branch located in Minhang.
He remembers with pride major developments that helped catapult the company into such global prominence. In his early days there, Xing worked on software related to mapping terrain to provide information for the construction of road, power and telecommunications networks.
At the time, he could hardly realize that first project he worked on would lead to the biggest order in Chinese software history only two decades later.
In 2011, the automotive electronic information system developed by Xing’s team was preloaded into the products of several international automobile manufacturers in an order valued at 3 billion yuan (US$483 million).
Growing up
One of the triggers of the order was Neusoft’s 20-year alliance with Japan-based Alpine Mobile Media Solutions related to the terrain information system.
“It was like watching my own child grow up, little by little,” said Xing.
Xing was growing up, too. He moved beyond programming to take up marketing and management positions in the company. In the process, he came up with his own marketing models.
“I once thought sales and marketing were outside science, and I admit I felt a bit uncomfortable when the company asked me to transfer from technical jobs to marketing,” he said. “But I later realized that marketing actually is very scientific.”
Most of the company’s work involves large projects, including software for the Gezhouba Hydropower Station in central China’s Hubei Province, a population database for the Ministry of Public Security and systems for the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
Marketing strategy aimed at big projects needs to be very specialized, Xing realized. Big clients involve large organizations and complicated decision-making processes. Xing said he believed there must be a mathematical model to analyze these processes and their rules.
Scientific marketing
“I started to analyze the projects we had done to see what could be learned from them,” he said. “That was in 2003. I called the outcome ‘Thesis 1.0.’”
Thesis 1.0 became Thesis 2.0 and then 3.0. Finally, in 2008, Xing finished the whole task by creating a marketing model he called “C139.” His work was published in the Harvard Business Review that year.
“Sales and marketing are not only about doing business,” Xing said. “People working in these two fields should be respected because of the complexity behind them.”
In 2007, Xing, who was born in Tieling, left his hometown in Liaoning and came to Shanghai as director of Neusoft Shanghai. One of his most significant tasks was to develop urban management information software for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.
“The organizers of the event told us that they had examined the software system used at the Aichi World Expo in Japan,” he said. “But Shanghai was much bigger and more complicated, so they couldn’t use it. We had to develop new software from scratch.”
It took three years to develop a system that combined a range of functions, from waste management to creating a clean environment in Shanghai.
After the success at World Expo, the company found its Shanghai office too cramped to cope with expanding business. Xing decided to move the Shanghai branch to the Zizhu National High-Tech Industrial Development Zone in Minhang.
The district certainly welcomed the company. In 2011, Xing was cited as a “leading talent” in Minhang, which channeled more research and development funds to the company. Last year, Xing was recommended by Minhang for citation as a “leading talent” in Shanghai.
Xing said the company is committed to serving the district. With Neusoft now developing a health care management system, the district government has expressed hopes that the company will participate in its “Intellectual Minhang” project, which is aimed at reforming health care and improving services for the elderly.
“I think this will be one of our future plans,” Xing said. “We will definitely make an effort to help the district.”
About Neusoft Group
Neusoft Group is the biggest IT solutions and services provider in China. The company has six research and development centers in China and a marketing network in 40 cities. It also operates branches in the United States, Japan, Europe and the Middle East. The company employs 20,000 people worldwide.
It provides software solutions to numerous sectors, including telecommunications, energy, public security, medical care, education and transport.
In 1996, Neusoft became the first software company to go public in China, with a listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
For 2013, the company reported earnings of 410.9 million yuan on revenue of 7.4 billion yuan.
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