They're Making Cuts in China, Too

The Shanghai Daily ran a feature last week about layoffs at KPMG’s China offices. Zhang Fengming writes in an off-the-cuff style that’s spread from Hong Kong’s English language papers to mainland cities: "Employees deemed to have performed poorly will be the first to lose their jobs.”

In addition to the layoffs in the auditing service offices in Shanghai, KPMG was also planning cuts in Bejing, according to an unnamed source.

Other interesting tidbits from The Daily:

Redundancies are rare in the industry in China, which has seen high growth in recent years with booming initial public offerings.

Ernst & Young, another of the big-four, said last week that it didn’t rule out salary cuts and job losses if the slowdown in the economy got worse.

Accounting firms are redeploying staff with the shrinking of IPOs and shifting emphasis to mergers and acquisition services and tax services.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is likely to cut flexible pay first in its Singapore office but no such move has been announced in China.

Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte bosses say they expect slower growth in China over the next few years. However, it still stood out as a market with higher growth when compared to the West.