Microsoft trawls 40 million Chinese graduates for top talent

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 12 August 2009 16:02

IT Industry - Development

Microsoft’s China based R&D laboratories, run by Dr Ya-Qin Zhang, an adjunct professor at the University of Sydney, are building up their talent reserves, trawling China’s annual crop of 40 million graduates for top talent.

Dr Zhang, a founding member of NICTA’s international business advisory group, formally opened the national ICT research group’s Techfest 09 in Sydney, which showcased 30 research projects currently underway. He noted that the growth of NICTA since its foundation in 2004 had been such that there were now more people employed in the organisation’s spin off companies than were employed in all of NICTA in 2004.

Dr Zhang is particularly familiar with growth, being a co-founder of Microsoft’s R&D Labs in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen - first established a decade ago. Since then they have grown to employ 3,500 people, Microsoft’s largest R&D group outside of the US.

“We are working in five areas: mobile embedded, web search and advertising, servers, entertainment, and specific emerging technologies for new markets.” Dr Zhang explained that this last category specifically focussed on development targeted at emerging markets for Microsoft such as China itself.

“The China market is growing very fast. But right now it is very small part of the revenue.” Dr Zhang declined to comment on exactly what proportion of Microsoft’s revenues came from sales into China but he confirmed; “It would be one of the fastest growing markets.”

However at present Microsoft was; “Investing more in the talent than on developing the market,” according to Dr Zhang.

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