Development of systematic partnering for Chinese contractors in international construction projects

• Main Author: Yibao, Wu
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2013
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/4390
• Institution: De La Salle University

In the past decades, Chinese contractors played increasingly significant roles in the international construction market where it is widely believed that they have the potential to develop competitively. However, Chinese contractors face some challenges such as local challenges, cross-cultural issues, language, and finance and management in the overseas projects. Therefore, this study was undertaken to identify the challenges, and investigate how Chinese contractors can achieve win-win situation by adopting partnering in the international construction market. To achieve the research objectives, the study carried out a questionnaire survey through face-to-face interviews of thirty numbers of executives of different sized Chinese contractors. Several statistical techniques including ranking analysis, mean comparison, T-test for significance, crosstabs etc. were utilized for data analysis via SPSS (Version 20). From the analysis, a scheme of systematic partnering for Chinese contractors was developed. The findings indicate that Chinese national contractors prefer partnering with Chinese provincial contractors or large size local contractors. Chinese provincial contractors on the other hand preferred partnering with Chinese national contractors, partnering with large size local contractors, and partnering with medium size local contractors (C and below) would be a better option. In additional, provincial contractor prefers subcontracting and joint venture, while national contractor prefers subcontracting as the substantive mode of implementing partnering. Moreover, the implementing mechanics of the proposed scheme include incorporating concepts or the principles of partnering into the collaboration, use partnering contract agreement that outline the principles of partnering collaboration via subcontracting and joint venture depending on the challenges, strengths and weaknesses of the contractors. The validity of proposed scheme was tested through interview of the executives of selected Chinese contractors and their local partners. Through validation, the proposed scheme was considered positive and applicable. 2 The proposed scheme closed the research gap by investigating the use of partnering to eliminate the challenges Chinese contractors experienced and provided a practical scheme for Chinese contractors. However, the proposed scheme has limitation in its application area as the study was limited to Chinese contractors in Kenya. It is suggested that a future study may be undertaken considering the entire Africa Region and sampling contractors from different nationality. 3