The Re-Emergence of Foreign Banks in Shanghai: An Ecological Analysis

Is China, met een van de snelst groeiende economieën ter wereld, inderdaad de markt van de hoge opbrengsten en snelle winsten zoals de media en de communis opinio ons willen doen geloven? Dit boek biedt een wat gematigder perspectief. Het laat zien, door de theorieën en methoden van de organisatie-ecologie te gebruiken, dat de complexiteit van de lokale markt vaak wordt onderschat. Op basis van een gedetailleerde analyse van de (wederom) opkomende populatie van buitenlandse banken in Shanghai, laat het zien dat nu meer en meer buitenlandse banken vestigingen opzetten in Shanghai, de concurrentie tussen deze banken dermate toeneemt dat het de toetrede van nieuwe banken in Shanghai in de weg staat. Buitenlandse banken hebben ook te maken met lange wachttijden voordat zij kunnen beginnen met het aanbieden van financiële diensten en daarnaast wordt hun winstgevendheid beïnvloedt door het toenemende aantal lokale banken. Vanuit een theoretisch perspectief dragen de bevindingen van dit onderzoek bij aan de studie naar her-opkomende organisatievormen, de studie naar de ecologische dynamiek voorafgaand aan de toetrede tot een populatie, en theorieën met betrekking tot concurrentie tussen populaties zoals die van de ‘middelenverdeling’.

Jeroen Kuilman was born in Hoogezand-Sappemeer on May 8, 1979. He attended Collegium Marianum in Venlo, from which he received his Atheneum diploma in 1997. After high school, Jeroen went on to study International Business at the University of Maastricht. He worked at Hewlett-Packard in Germany in 2000 and was an exchange student at Keimyung University, South Korea, in 2001. In October 2001, Jeroen received his Master’s degree with a thesis on headquarter-subsidiary relationships within multinational corporations. In November 2001, Jeroen became a Ph.D. student in the Department of Organization and Personnel Management at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He traveled to Shanghai at the end of his second year as a doctoral student, to collect data on the history of the local banking industry during three months of field research. In the spring semester of 2004, Jeroen studied at Stanford University where he was trained in ecological theory and methods of analysis. During his time as a doctoral student, he presented papers at several major international conferences and seminars, such as the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management and the Organizational Ecology Conference at the University of Durham. Jeroen will be working as a post-doctoral researcher at RSM Erasmus University as of November 1, 2005. His main research interests include organizational ecology, industry evolution, and international business.

Is China, with one of the world’s fastest growing economies, indeed the market of high returns and quick profits as the popular press and communis opinio seem to suggest? This book offers a more moderated perspective. It shows, by employing theories and methods from the field of organizational ecology, that the intricacies of the local market might frequently have been underestimated. Based on a detailed analysis of the re-emerging population of foreign banks in Shanghai, it points out that as more and more foreign banks set up operations in Shanghai, competition among them is intensifying to the extent that it is deterring the founding of new foreign banks in Shanghai. Foreign banks furthermore face long waiting times before they can start providing banking services and, in addition, their profitability is affected by the growing number of domestic banks. From a theoretical perspective, the findings in this book add significantly to the study of re-emerging organizational forms, the study of ecological dynamics prior to entry into a population, and theories concerning inter-population competition such as resource partitioning.