Jack Ma, founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, sits in a newly launched sedan model of the Roewe RX5, an internet-connected SUV, jointly made by Alibaba and SAIC Motor Corp, last month in Hangzhou. (XU KANGPING/CHINA DAILY)
Major companies into electric vehicles, vie for designers, software developers, engineers
China's biggest iPhone maker, largest e-commerce company and leading internet-video producer are all in the hunt to build electric vehicles or EVs－and to grab the small pool of available talent to build them.
All of this is great news for marketing professional Ronan Lu, 32. The bidding wars see some workers earning double their peers' salaries and others landing jobs with minimal experience, according to recruiters.
"Many companies offered me job opportunities with good payment, but I chose LeEco because I believe it has great potential," said Lu, who left Toyota Motor Corp to join LeEco's auto division in Beijing last month.
"Startup EV companies usually can offer a higher salary than traditional automakers. You can get good rewards from stock holdings in such companies."
More than 200 Chinese companies－their backers include Terry Gou, Ma Huateng, Jack Ma and Jia Yueting－are developing 4,000 models of new-energy vehicles or NEVs and unveiling prototypes at motor shows and home-electronics expos.
Traditional automakers and a bevy of startups see opportunity in the government's commitment to boost yearly sales of NEVs by a factor of 10 in the next decade.
China surpassed the United States last year to become the world's biggest market for NEVs, a fleet comprising electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids and fuel-cell cars. Domestic automakers sold 331,092 units in 2015, according to the State-backed China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.
The Chinese government has set a sales target of 3 million units a year by 2025. China also is accelerating construction of charging stations to serve 5 million EVs by 2020.
'Prying Talent'
"Internet companies that want to make cars are prying talents from us, and other rival automakers are also trying to lure them away," said Wang Jun, vice president of Chongqing Changan Automobile Co. "It has not only inflated human-resource costs but also changed people's expectations about their future."
The positions in top demand include designers, software developers and engineers focusing on systems architecture and creating "smart cities", said Shirley Xia, an auto-industry recruiter in Beijing for Aimsen & Company.
Recently, Xia and seven colleagues suspended all projects for 45 days to search for an engineer to design charging poles for EVs.
Their client, an auto parts maker, wanted someone with at least three years of experience but settled for a candidate with half that.
"For some positions that only emerged over the past couple of years, there aren't that many talents in the market," Xia said. "It's challenging for us to find candidates."
Salaries for key research-and-development workers have risen 30 percent this year, with some reaching 1 million yuan ($151,000), said Jennifer Feng, chief human resource expert at Shanghai-based 51job Inc. That's almost 16 times the national average for urban Chinese, based on data from the National Bureau of Statistics.
