What Is Keeping CEOs in China Up at Night?

Now in its third year, the COVID-19 pandemic is clearly a marathon, not a sprint. In China, the negative consequences of the pandemic continue to exert pressure on the Chinese economy and business environment.

Even before the Ukraine crisis, recession risk, changing consumer behaviors, rising inflation, global political instability, global trade disruptions, and margin compression were at the top of high-impact events in 2022 for CEOs in China according to The Conference Board’s annual C-Suite Outlook survey. Each is directly tied to the pandemic’s course and requires urgent action across business model transformation, cash flow management, cost containment, supply chain flexibility, and innovative human capital management aimed at building a more resilient and agile workforce. All of these are priority actions on the radar of CEOs in China. The fallout from the situation in Ukraine will make many of these stress points more intense and the actions to mitigate their impact more urgent.

However, few CEOs globally and in China believe their organizations are well prepared to deal with future crises from new pandemics to inflation to climate change and supply chain disruption.

The Challenge of Changing Chinese Consumption Patterns: A Complex Story

As in most places, the COVID pandemic has shifted Chinese consumer buying behaviors, producing a boom in online sales and challenging firms to modify their business models to keep up. Indeed, almost 40% of CEOs in China cite changes in consumer behavior as a significant high impact issue for their organizations in 2022 — double the number of CEOs in the US and Europe. But in China, the story of consumer behavior is more complex than it appears on the surface.

E-commerce, which the government considers to be a key engine of future growth, has boomed throughout the pandemic period in China — until recently. The COVID pandemic has shifted previous household spending patterns away from discretionary spending towards non-discretionary necessities like food. Before the pandemic, urban households were allocating a growing share of their spending to discretionary categories while spending on necessities grew at a much slower pace; its share in total consumption shrinking. Since the start of the pandemic, growth rates for discretionary spending categories have slowed down significantly. Slower disposable income growth, a relatively weak labor market, and strict mobility controls for COVID containment are holding back discretionary spending. Q4 2021 online retail sales growth was 3.9 percent year-over-year, substantially below the 7 percent annual growth needed to hit the government’s official 2025 online retail sales growth targets. January and February data surprised to the upside, but rising COVID cases and associated commercial disruptions will continue to pose downside risks for consumption.

From a business perspective, providing real-time data-driven insights on changing consumer behaviors and attitudes and their potential impact on the business is a critical challenge.

What’s Driving Inflation and How Long Will It Last: the CEO View

While reported inflation rates in China are relatively low compared to the rest of the world, there was growing concern among CEOs in China about rising prices and costs even before the Ukraine crisis. More than a quarter of China CEOs cite rising inflation as a high impact issue in our 2022 survey—more than double the percentage from just a year earlier. Some 93% of CEOs in China say they are facing upward pricing pressures for inputs, including raw materials and wages — and it’s not going away anytime soon in their view. Almost half believe this pressure will persist until mid-2023 and beyond—and that was before the Ukraine crisis. They see the main drivers as supply chain bottle necks and soaring energy prices.

CEO concerns about inflation are justified. The Conference Board expects the currently low inflation in consumer prices in China to climb in the coming months. The Ukraine crisis is causing a rise in global energy prices and disruptions to China’s imports of agricultural products such as corn, wheat, and fertilizer. All add significantly to inflationary pressure. The current headline CPI target of 3% (implying modest CPI growth) in 2022 will be challenging to maintain. Rising consumer price inflation, combined with slow income growth, COVID restrictions, and slow job creation, will weigh on household expenditure growth in 2022 and drag on growth. Interestingly, more CEOs in China say they are willing to absorb price increases than their colleagues globally.

How Work Will Get Redefined: Remote Work Expected to Grow

CEOs in China say that the main human resource challenges ahead are building a more resilient workforce, establishing a more innovative culture, and developing more agile teams.

Remote work, vital to many firms during pandemic-related shutdowns, is here to stay globally. So too for China, but to a lesser extent. A third of CEOs globally expect that at least 40% of employees will work remotely after the pandemic subsides compared to 17% prepandemic. While the percentages in China are smaller, they still signal a significant change within the local context. In China, just 17% of CEOs say they are planning for at least 40% of employees to be remote one year after the pandemic subsides (compared to 53% in the US). That number is up from just 11% pre-pandemic in China, but down from 33% during the pandemic. Despite a relatively low absolute number of remote employees in a post-pandemic China, the firms that had between 11% and 20% of employees working remotely before the pandemic will more than double from 15% to 33% post pandemic. This newfound embrace of remote work carries important implications for worker productivity and how organizations hire, lead, and foster a hybrid workplace culture. Talented people can now reasonably expect opportunities to work when and where they like—and may be prepared to seek employment elsewhere if these choices are denied to them. The growing reality is that, in the knowledge economy, work has been decoupled from location and employees no longer must be in a specific place to do a job. Talent can work from anywhere, and in the gig economy at any time. Physical space is no longer a constraint for most industries.

Some 42% of CEOs in China see remote work only as a temporary fix that is unsustainable in the long run— by the far the highest percentage of CEOs with this view globally. Embracing a hybrid work mode, either in the short-term or for the long haul presents significant challenges: more than half of China CEOs believe a hybrid model will increase the competition for talent putting added pressure on traditional HR practices and they believe projects will take longer to complete. Collectively, they fear that it will also decrease worker productivity, the quality of internal relationships, the strength of corporate culture, and the pace of skill building. On the positive side: just under half expect to see improvements in innovation and external collaboration.

Getting it right will take work. More than three-quarters of China CEOs say a high performing hybrid work model requires significant change in corporate culture, more effective internal communication, new management skills for team leaders and executives, and a rethink of total rewards structures. All of this requires a strategic approach to implementing hybrid work models. Business leaders need to be clear and decisive about how much remote work will be allowed and in what types of jobs, how hybrid work models will be managed, how workers will be compensated, and where workers can be located.

A Look at ESG Priorities

CEOs in China cite becoming more sustainable as their second highest internal priority for 2022. Achieving this will require greater focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. According to our survey their top environmental priorities are energy and climate change, and their top social issues are improving economic opportunity, equality and labor conditions – all in line with the government’s “Common Prosperity” campaign.

Shocking Lack of Preparedness for the Next Crisis

What new crises may emerge in the coming year is impossible to predict. But with some foresight and investment, crippling disruptions can be prevented by reducing risk exposures and taking preemptive measures to mitigate their impacts. The generally admitted lack of preparedness for future shocks among CEOs both in China and globally raises questions about the resilience of many organizations. For many, climate change, cyber security and business continuity strategies remain formative.

Who is ready for what?

• A total of 65% of CEOs in Europe and 55% in the U.S. say their organizations are well or very well prepared to handle a future pandemic-related crisis, compared to just 28% in China and 27% in Japan.

• A majority of US and European CEOs (53% and 54% respectively) also say they are well prepared to meet a crisis related to financial instability compared to just 32% in China and 24% in Japan.

• Globally less than 40% of CEOs say their organizations are well prepared to meet challenges posed by future crisis related to inflation, cybersecurity, natural disasters, supply chain disruptions, and climate change. The numbers are worse for China:

 inflation 33%

 cybersecurity 29%

 natural disasters 22%

 supply chain disruptions 29%

 climate change 21%

 civil unrest 19%

• Despite this relative lack of preparedness, update crises contingency plans ranks just 14th (out of 24 choices) as an internal focus for CEOs in China in 2022.

So Many Challenges Ahead

Many CEOs in China and globally are running organizations where their workforce, including key C-suite executives, have never experienced such elevated levels of geopolitical instability or such inflationary conditions. Agility will be a critical factor to thrive in such a turbulent environment. In our previous C-Suite Challenge surveys, CEOs identified the critical traits that make an agile organization as: effective and engaged change leaders; resilient employees/individuals that adapt to change; an open and transparent speak-up culture; communicating consistently and transparently at all organizational level and effective use of big data analytics to inform decision making. All of these traits are now more essential than ever as organizations reset and reimagine to thrive in the unquietly turbulent global environment ahead. The question is: are CEOs and their organizations up to the task?

(Editor’s Note: This article is based on the findings of The Conference Board C-Suite Outlook Survey which was fielded globally in October and November of 2021 and reported in “C-Suite Outlook 2022: Reset and Reimagine”. Please visit www.conference-board.org to learn more and to download the full report. The Conference Board is a global, independent member-driven think tank that delivers trusted insights for what’s ahead while working in the public interest.

Anke Schrader, Research Director, The Conference Board Asia, oversees research programs for the Asia region. She also leads research and corporate engagement on sustainability, ESG, citizenship, and sustainable development for Asia. Anke graduated from the University of Konstanz, Germany with a master’s degree in Public Policy and Management.

Charles Mitchell, the Executive Director, Content Quality at The Conference Board, is responsible for ensuring the objectivity, independence, accuracy, and business relevance of the organization’s research. In recent years he has spent considerable time in Asia-Pacific, working with our Councils to develop region-specific content. He is the author of several books dealing with international business cultures, customs, and etiquette and holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in the US.