Students help Chinese Antivirus firm enter U.S. market
Beijing Rising, a leading seller of antivirus software in China and Japan, wants to break into the U.S. market. Larry Glover and four fellow graduate students at the University of Tampa have a few words of advice:
Don’t bother targeting the personal computer market. It’s taken.
Change your name.
And be ready to spend millions.
The UT students learned about Beijing Rising’s U.S. aspirations last summer, when their classmates met with company executives during a study trip to China led by UT professor Glen Taylor.
Taylor asked the students, who are in a master’s degree program in technology and innovation management, to formulate a marketing plan and present it to Beijing Rising when a group returns to China in May.
Glover, at 43 one of the older UT grad students, is used to pitching projects to Chinese clients. From 2001 to 2003, he and a partner were consultants on credit card and Internet security for a number of Asian clients, including several companies in China. Family matters - he has two young daughters - made him decide to limit grueling overseas trips, so two years ago he joined HSBC, one of the world’s largest financial service organizations. In April, he moved to the bank’s technology offices in Tampa, which it acquired when it bought Household Finance in March 2003.