IS LANGUAGE REALLY SUCH A BARRIER? DON'T MOST BUSINESS PEOPLE IN ASIA SPEAK ENGLISH?

While many people in Asia do speak English, it is a stretch to say that most do. Some regions and industries are better than others. In many large companies, you can find fluent English speakers, but the key question is do all the decision makers speak fluent English? Mostly, we find that critical members of the core decision-making group are not fluent and local language is key to effective business transactions. A look at the websites for Japanese companies is very illustrative. For the multinational corporations, you will most often be redirected to the US site for most content in English. You will rarely find any information about the Japanese market or services in Japan by these large enterprises. The websites for the mid-size companies often contains only rudimentary, token content in English. APV's bilingual professionals can help you converse with all decision makers, and can help retrieve key relevant facts from local-language websites which we use to leverage our efforts in those countries.