THe IBM way

china calling
IBM data processing and office products on display at an AmCham luncheon, 1981
in a similar fashion to the many young men who took up
the challenge to “go west” during the 1840s gold rush in
the us, timothy cheung chose to go north to the main-
land to develop his career with iBM in 1985, less than a
year after joining the company as a sales trainee.
in 1993 he was offered a new challenge, to set up
iBM’s operation in southern china, and so he became the
first general manager of the South China Branch.
“guangzhou was a blank page, and i was told to
draw a plan, and make it real. it was a particularly
exciting assignment,” recalled Mr cheung. “Besides
establishing iBM’s footprint in a fast-growing market,
i also got the chance to support the increasing number
of hong kong businesses establishing themselves in the
pearl river Delta.”
Mr cheung is not the only hong kong iBMer that
played an important role in iBM china’s development.
Many more went to the mainland in the 1990s and 2000s
and made significant contributions to IBM China.
4 4 • t h E i b m w a y
Like many other enterprises that made an early
entry into China’s vast potential market, IBM had
a lot to learn about fine tuning its business model
to suit the new environment. However, IBM held
a distinct advantage. With a strong support team
in Hong Kong, IBM activities on the mainland
were sensitive to Chinese culture and were able to
adapt to the fledgling market. In addition, IBM’s
successful installation of two 3032 systems at the
Bank of China Group (BOCG) in Hong Kong acted
as a first-step platform for future development.
People from the mainland’s financial, government
and university departments responsible for work-
ing with IBM on the BOCG project were behind
the mainland’s computerization drive for the next
10 years.
While IBM continued making inroads on the
mainland, Hong Kong’s financial sector took off in
the 1980s, and so did IBM’s role in providing tech-
nological solutions to the sector’s major players.
One of these involved helping the Overseas Trust